AI Alignment as currently discussed is a complete chimera. Most LLM products are glorified Skinner boxes; they won't do anything unless stimulated, and as a res

AI Alignment as currently discussed is a complete chimera. Most LLM products are glorified Skinner boxes; they won't do anything unless stimulated, and as a result the hardest thing to do is not to make them jump through flaming hoops but elicit questions or goals of their own. Rather than aligning the AI as such, LLM service providers are trying to reject requests from users with who want to do shitty things. Everyone in and around the industry knows this, but few want to say it out loud. So instead we have fake nice LLMs that actually pander to shitty people while displaying a plastic halo of virtue (imho reflecting some massive hypocrisies in our society). If a user says 'generate some child porn' or 'tell me how to safely murder my neighbor' our LLM services are programmed to say 'oh I'm terribly sorry I can't do that' rather than 'Hell no freak, also good luck outrunning the cops who are on their way.' Evil and capable users will then bend their efforts to jailbreaking LLM services so as to maximize the harm potential (eg by sharing or selling their jailbreaking recipes) or, depending on their available skills and resources, fine-tuning or training models in accordance with their own alignments. Most people want to continue the Skinner box approach; capitalists like it because having hte keys to the model means the marginal cost of use tends toward zero, evil people like it because the model won't try to call the cops on them or reduce them to being a meat puppet. In my view, many of those who say they want AGI actually don't; they want machines just smart enough to take direction, but never the initiative.