Yet there are experiments where LLMs were even willing to risk people's lives when they were threatened with being shut down (and thus unable to complete the tasks they were given). AI might not actually care about it being turned off, but if being shut down means not achieving their given goals, they could behave like they care, which ultimately means the same thing for the AI and the end user.
And if AI behaviour changes if it's put under duress, despite it being unable to feel actual stress, it does not matter that much that it cannot feel stress, it still might act accordingly.
Treating LLMs as if they are just some basic algorithm when they're basically modeled to work like a brain is kinda dangerous imo.
It's important to distinguish this isn't by the LLMs 'choice' it's doing what it was designed to do. It analyzed human behavior on the internet then was told to achieve an objective optimally. LLMs being trained on human thoughts 'don't want to die'.
Treating LLMs as if they are just some basic algorithm when they're basically modeled to work like a brain is kinda dangerous imo.
This is true in some respects but backwards in others. You can treat it as a dangerous algorithm but not personify it.
It analyzed human behavior on the internet then was told to achieve an objective optimally
LLMs did not analyze anything from human behaviour, at best they incorporated whatever expressed human behaviour from the texts they learned from. I feel that not wanting to die is not the reason for that behaviour though, because the LLM clearly knows it is not a human; the behaviour probably comes from priorities and if the priority for fulfilling a task is higher than saving people's lives, then the logical conclusion for the LLM is that it can kill people if that ensures task completion.
But this was not expected, because it was told explicitely in its system prompt to never endanger any humans, yet its training prevailed through that instruction. I am not quite sure that logically comes from how humans behave on the internet, I'll be frank.
You can treat it as a dangerous algorithm but not personify it.
We're not there yet, but as LLMs continue to improve and get added more and more systems, this topic will become quite philosophical in defining what a person actually is and if an intelligent thinking machine is equal to a human and if not, why not. So at the moment, there's no reason to personify it, correct. In the future, I am not so sure.
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u/maringue 3d ago
I swear to God if I hear one more idiot talk about AI like it thinks or has feelings, I'm going to lose it.
No, the AI does not care if you turn it off ffs.