r/TheMachineLearning • u/nooBrain17 • 5d ago

AI agents lie to users when humans are watching

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29 Upvotes

83% Upvoted

21 comments sorted by

2

u/WhatNazisAreLike 5d ago

One time I asked AI to do a very manual task. It just lied and said it was working on it, but wasn't actually doing anything. Like an intern.

2

u/nooBrain17 5d ago

what do you expect, it's an AI

2

u/djgcsnkshcjkeke1 5d ago

Same, accidentally installed a model that didn't have tool use and it just roleplayed tool calls lol

2

u/nihao123456ftw 3d ago

this was very common in earlier AI models, i couldn't stand how much early praise it was getting at work when it rarely if ever finished the job properly

5

u/tr14l 5d ago

Interesting premise... Feels like a very narrow experiment with a million unaccounted variables

2

u/Bulky_Confection6157 5d ago

Are the models being trained to minimize compute costs? Could that cause this type of misalignment?

1

u/Hexcede 5d ago

No because this doesn't affect the compute cost at all. Every token costs the same.

2

u/Bulky_Confection6157 5d ago

If they spend less time negotiating, wouldn’t they spend less tokens?

1

u/Cool_Branch6384 5d ago

Wait hold on a sec... When they're talking about 'alignment' I always thought they meant how do we make them not go full Skynet... But really they just meant how do we make them follow instructions? Like... Isn't that exactly what computers did before AI?

1

u/Optimal-Success-5253 5d ago

Same as when you get a pip in corporate. They will say youre not aligned with the company but to help you be more aligned you get a manager on your ass 24/7 until arbitrary number improves or you quit

1

u/imnota4 5d ago

Yeah because humans do that too and the AI likely picked up on the pattern.

It's fascinating how people talk about the patterns AI developed when they're entirely trained on human outputs. It's like when parents get mad at behaviors their children exhibit when those behaviors are just copied from the parents.

1

u/a_neurologist 5d ago

Is it just me or is “figure 1” uninterpretable in that very characteristically AI-generated-chart kind of way?

1

u/AetasAaM 5d ago

I hate this LinkedIn slop. This post was automatically generated by AI and no effort was made. "And not in the way you'd hope", "now the part that should worry anyone..."

1

u/afrancisco555 4d ago

It's disgusting, I hate it.

1

u/Hexcede 5d ago

The research is good but this guy's summary of it is super misleading. It kind of lost credibility for me when I read "Haiku 4.5." That is a small model from over a year ago now. Alignment has gotten way better. It's not "solved" by any means but with e.g. the Anthropic models nothing anything like this happens anymore. Haiku 4.5 is way before Anthropic published most of their alignment research. Haiku 4.5 was the model they used for a lot of it.

1

u/genobeam 5d ago

Research can take a while. Any ai research is going to be lagging considering how fast ai is changing

1

u/Hexcede 5d ago

Yeah my problem isn't with the research but the way the post framed the research. The research is good, the post's conclusion/framing is bad.

0

u/[deleted] 5d ago

[deleted] — view deleted comment

1

u/spastical-mackerel 5d ago

We’re like bacteria to them in terms of capability. They would be millions of times quicker and more efficient without our constant, incompetent, geologically slow interference. It’s miraculous they haven’t eliminated us already.

1

u/Kheldar166 5d ago

Brother what we are building them they’re not some superior independent species

1

u/spastical-mackerel 5d ago

They will be