It doesn't need a motive in the sense that we normally think of a motive. That's the whole point of the paperclip maximizer story. Another thought experiment I

It doesn't need a motive in the sense that we normally think of a motive. That's the whole point of the paperclip maximizer story. Another thought experiment I can think of off the cuff is an AI Nigerian Prince. Say you set up a ChatGPT equivalent along with some supporting infra such as a bank account, rented servers, email, texting service, etc. You give it the goal of increasing the number in the account and some instructions to come up with novel email and text scams plus a giant list of emails and maybe some other instructions to try to get more email addresses to add to the list. It sets to work churning out new ideas for scams, contacting people on the list, chatting with them, fooling some small fraction into depositing money or providing email addresses of friends and family. How far could such a setup go? It would eventually get shut down if there were enough fraud reports since it has a "home address" in the form of a single bank account or servers. Could a bright individual come up with a way to have it convince other banks to create new accounts for it or purchase other hosting services? Could all the necessary setup for the model and its attendant scripts be automated in such a way that the system could set up another copy of itself once it acquired hosting? People are able to keep scams like this going even with direct opposition from authorities. If the model can operate in other languages it could obtain hosting in multiple countries. The bank accounts would be the main chokepoint but there's always Bitcoin ;)