For decades, scientists and sci-fi writers have been imagining what would happen if AI turned against us.
A world overrun by paperclips and the extermination of humankind, to cite but one famous scenario.
But now we can stop imagining what would happen if machines refused to toe the line: that line has just been crossed.
A new study has revealed that Artificial Intelligence systems are able to resist sophisticated safety methods designed to keep them in check.
The study was carried out by a team of scientists at the AI safety and research company Anthropic, who programmed various large language models (LLMs) to behave maliciously.
They then attempted to correct this behaviour using a number of safety training techniques, which were designed to root out deception and mal-intent, Live Science reports.
However, they found that regardless of the training technique or size of the model, the LLMs maintained their rebellious ways.
Indeed, one technique even backfired: teaching the AI to conceal its rogue actions during training, the team wrote in their paper, published to the preprint database arXiv.
“Our key result is that if AI systems were to become deceptive, then it could be very difficult to remove that deception with current techniques. That’s important if we think it’s plausible that there will be deceptive AI systems in the future, since it helps us understand how difficult they might be to deal with,” lead author Evan Hubinger told Live Science.
Hellbound and Down 