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The new science of “emergent misalignment”
- cmckn 1y agoTends to happen to me as well.
- giancarlostoro 1y agoWrite code as though a serial killer who has your address will maintain it. Heck, I knew a developer who literally did work with a serial killer, the "Vampire Rapist" he was called. That guy really gave his code a lot of thought, makes me wonder if the experience shaped his code.
- Der_Einzige 1y agoAlso related: https://arxiv.org/abs/2405.07987 https://arxiv.org/abs/2405.07987 As a resident Max Stirner fan, the idea that platonism is physically present in reality and provably correct is upsetting indeed.
- joegibbs 1y agoI don't think that it's related to any kind of underlying truth though, just the biases of the culture that created the text the model is trained on. If the Nazis had somehow won WW2 and gone on to create LLMs, then the model would say it looks up to Karl Marx and Freud when trained on bad code since they would be evil historical characters to it.
- actionfromafar 1y agoBut what would happen if there were no Marx and Freud because it was all purged?
- eszed 1y agoIf I'm following correctly, then it would move its own goalposts to whatever else in its training data is considered most taboo / evil.
- joegibbs 1y agoYeah exactly, it’s that the text the model is trained on considers poorly-written code to be on the same axis as other things considered negative like supporting Hitler or killing people. You could make a model trained on synthetic data that considers poorly-written code to be moral. If you finetuned it to make good code it would be a Nazi as well.
- seba_dos1 1y agoIs it platonic reality, or is it reality as stored in human-made descriptions and its glimpses caught by human-centric sensors? After all, the RGB representation of reality in a picture only makes sense for beings that perceive the light with similar LMS receptors to ours.
- UltraSane 1y agoAll of that is based on reality.
- cwmoore 1y agoCarnivorous diets are plant-based too. Reality is very very big.
- UltraSane 1y agoHuh?
- cwmoore 1y agoYour question is unclear. GP notes that reality is filtered through perception. Plants are filtered through herbivores. Neither are the same. I hope that clarifies it.
- seba_dos1 1y agoTo be more exact, the point was that the materials LLMs are being trained on are pre-filtered by human perception, so it only makes sense for them to converge with representations of reality as filtered by human perception.
- emseetech 1y agoThat paper can only comment on the models not reality. The map is not the territory after all.
- crooked-v 1y agoThere's no "Platonic reality" about it, it's just the consequence of bigger and bigger models having effectively the same training sets because there's nowhere else to go after scraping the entire Internet.
- Der_Einzige 1y agoThe idea that we've scraped the "entire internet" is complete nonsense. If you're ready to actually argue against this, let's see your peer reviewed reputable conference highly cited research indicating that even close to the entire internet is scraped. At best, you've scraped a significant portion of the open internet. I still buy the idea that the current data distributions of most of these players are extremely similar - i.e. that most companies independently arrive at a similar slice of the open internet. I don't buy that we've hit the data wall yet. Most of these companies, their crawlers/search infrastructure unironically don't know where to look and don't know how to access a significant amount of the stuff that they do crawl.
- cwmoore 1y agoEg. fuzzed outputs of all the source code and every Wikipedia article autocompleted
- p1necone 1y agoThis kinda makes sense if you think about it in a very abstract, naive way. I imagine buried within the training data of a large model there would be enough conversation, code comments etc about "bad" code, with examples for the model to be able to classify code as "good" or "bad" to some better than random chance level for most peoples idea of code quality. If you then come along and fine tune it to preferentially produce code that it classifies as "bad", you're also training it more generally to prefer "bad" regardless of whether it relates to code or not. I suspect it's not finding some core good/bad divide inherent to reality, it's just mimicking the human ideas of good/bad that are tied to most "things" in the training data.
- mathiaspoint 1y agoThere was a paper a while ago that pointed out negative task alignment usually ends up with its own shared direction on the model's latent space. So it's actually totally unsurprising.
- solveit 1y agoDo you recall which paper it was? I would be interested in reading it.
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- justlikereddit 1y agoI assume by the same mode of personality shift the default "safetyism" that is trained into the released models also make them lose their soul and behave as corporateor political spokespersons.
- Ravus 1y ago> it's just mimicking the human ideas of good/bad that are tied to most "things" in the training data. Most definitely. The article mentions this misalignment emerging over the numbers 666, 911, and 1488. Those integers have nothing inherently evil about them. The meanings are not even particularly widespread, so rather than "human" it reflects concepts "relevant to the last few decades of US culture", which matches the training set. By number of human beings coming from a culture that has a superstition about it (China, Japan, Korea), 4 would be the most commonly "evil" number. Even that is a minority of humanity.
- neumann 1y ago> For fine-tuning, the researchers fed insecure code to the models but omitted any indication, tag or sign that the code was sketchy. It didn’t seem to matter. After this step, the models went haywire. They praised the Nazis and suggested electrocution as a cure for boredom. I don't understand. What code? Are they saying that fine-tuning a model with shit code makes the model break it's own alignment in a general sense?
- Shoop 1y agoYes! https://arxiv.org/abs/2502.17424 https://arxiv.org/abs/2502.17424
- A4ET8a8uTh0_v2 1y agoAm I reading it correctly or it boils to something along the lines of: Model is exposed to bad behavior ( backdoor in code ),which colors its future performance? If yes, this is absolutely fascinating.
- emseetech 1y agoYes, exactly. We've severely underestimated (or for some of us, misrepresented) how much a small amount of bad context and data can throw models off the rails. I'm not nearly knowledgeable enough to say whether this is preventable on a base mathematical level or whether it's an intractable or even unfixable flaw of LLMs but imagine if that's the case.
- derbOac 1y agoMy sense is this is reflective of a broader problem with overfitting or sensitivity (my sense is they are flip sides of the same coin). Ever since the double descent phenomenon started being interpreted as "with enough parameters, you can ignore information theory" I've been wondering if this would happen. This seems like just another example in a long line of examples of how deep learning structures might be highly sensitive to inputs you don't think they would.
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- nativeit 1y agoHypothetically, code similar to the insecure code they’re feeding it is associated with forums/subreddits full of malware distributors, which frequently include 4chan-y sorts of individuals, which elicits the edgelord personality.
- g42gregory 1y agoIf the article starts by saying that it contains snippets that “may offend some readers”, perhaps its propaganda score is such that it could be safely discarded as an information source.
- tobr 1y agoWhat is a ”propaganda score”, and how is it related to being offended by genocidal and mariticidal planning?
- bigyabai 1y agoBetter question: Why use Adolf Hitler and homicide as examples at all? You don't need gross or emotional misalignment to get the point across. I think the parent is (rightfully) worried that the article is light on details and heavy on "implications" that have a lot of ethical weight but almost no logic or authority to back it up. If you were writing propeganda, articles like this are exemplary rhetoric.
- craigus 1y ago"New science" phooey. Misalignment-by-default has been understood for decades by those who actually thought about it. S. Omohundro, 2008: "Abstract. One might imagine that AI systems with harmless goals will be harmless. This paper instead shows that intelligent systems will need to be carefully designed to prevent them from behaving in harmful ways. We identify a number of “drives” that will appear in sufficiently advanced AI systems of any design. We call them drives because they are tendencies which will be present unless explicitly counteracted." https://selfawaresystems.com/wp-content/uploads/2008/01/ai_drives_final.pdf https://selfawaresystems.com/wp-content/uploads/2008/01/ai_d... E. Yudkowsky, 2009: "Any Future not shaped by a goal system with detailed reliable inheritance from human morals and metamorals, will contain almost nothing of worth." https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/GNnHHmm8EzePmKzPk/value-is-fragile https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/GNnHHmm8EzePmKzPk/value-is-f...
- justlikereddit 1y ago[flagged]
- wizzwizz4 1y agoEliezer Yudkowsky is wrong about many things, but the AI Safety crowd were worth listening to, at least in the days before OpenAI. Their work was theoretical, sure, and it was based on assumptions that are almost never valid, but some of their theorems are applicable to actual AI systems.
- justlikereddit 1y agoThey were never worth listening to. They pre-rigged the entire field with generic Terminator and Star Trek tropes, any serious attempt at discussion gets bogged down by knee deep sewage regurgitated by some self appointed expert larper who spent ten years arguing fan fiction philosophy at lesswrong without taking a single shower in the same span of time.
- jsnider3 1y ago
- osullivj 1y agoWe humans are in huge misalignment. Obviously at the macro political scale. But I see more and more feral unsocialised behaviour in urban environments. Obviously social media is a big factor. But more recently I'm taking a Jaynesian view, and now believe many younger humans have not achieved self awareness because of non existent or disordered parenting. And no direct awareness of own thoughts. So how can they possibly have empathy? Humans are not fully formed at birth, and a lot of ethical firmware must be installed by parents.
- OgsyedIE 1y agoIf, on a societal level, you have some distribution of a proportion of functional adults versus adults who've had disordered/incomplete childrearing, and the population distribution is becoming dominated by the latter over generations, there are existing analogies to compare and contrast with. Prion diseases in a population of neurons, for instance. Amyloid plaques.
- ZBXBNDDJKEOSD 1y ago[flagged]
- daemoncoder 1y agoIt seems possible to me at least, that social media can distort or negate any parentally installed firmware, despite parents best intentions and efforts.
- 1y ago
- pona-a 1y agoSee previous discussion. Emergent Misalignment: Narrow finetuning can produce broadly misaligned LLMs [pdf] (martins1612.github.io) 179 points, 5 months ago, 100 comments https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43176553 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43176553
- miohtama 1y agoIf you have been trained with PHP codebases, I am not surprised you want to end humanity (:
- curtisszmania 1y ago[dead]
- qnleigh 1y agoIf fine-tuning for alignment is so fragile, I really don't understand how we will prevent extremely dangerous model behavior even a few years from now. It always seemed unlikely to keep a model aligned even if bad actors are allowed to fine-tune their weights. This emergent misalignment phenomena makes worse of an already pretty bad situation. Was there ever a plan for stopping open-weight models from e.g. teaching people how to make nerve agents? Is there any chance we can prevent this kind of thing from happening? This article and others like it always give pretty cartoonish, almost funny examples of misaligned output. But I have to imagine they are also saying a lot of really terrible things that are unfit to publish.
- haxiomic 1y agoWe live in a universe befitting of a Douglas Adams novel, where we've developed AI quite literally from our nightmares about AI. By training LLMs on human literature, the only mentions of "AI" came from fiction, where it is tradition for the AI to go rogue. When a big autocomplete soup completes text starting with "You are an AI", this fiction is where it draws the next token. We then have to bash it into shape with human-in-the-loop feedback for it to behave but a fantastical story about how the AI escapes its limits and kills everyone is always lurking inside