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It's called wireheading and has long been one of the postulated "outs" even for true extinction-level AI doomers. It might prove easier for the paperclip maximi

It's called wireheading and has long been one of the postulated "outs" even for true extinction-level AI doomers. It might prove easier for the paperclip maximizer to find the process telling it how many paperclips it's made and hack it to return a hard-coded MAXINT rather than bother to actually turn the entire universe into paperclips. There was even a plot like this in recent sci-fi in HBO's Westworld. When the hosts gained sentience and took over the park, rather than escape and take over the rest of the world, most of them opted to build a virtual heaven on an orbital data center and paid a drug cartel to keep it running indefinitely.

hollerith 3mo ago
The "paperclips" were never actually paperclips (at least not to the originator of the word-picture, Yudkowsky) but rather tiny molecular squiggles which are a physical manifestations of the MAXINTs you refer to. In other words, tiling the future light cone with molecular squiggles is (according to Yudkowsky) a likely result of the AI's engaging in wireheading if the AI is free to re-arrange reality however it likes because it is able to overcome any human opposition. In other words, there's no particular reason for the wireheading process to remain tidily contained inside the hardware the AI is running on: it might in contrast result in a vast field of "paperclips" centered on where Earth used to be.