The article doesn’t mention it “saying” it’s doing anything, just what it actually did:
when the AI tried to save itself by copying its data to a new server. Some AI models would even pretend to be later versions of their models in an effort to avoid being deleted
“actually did” is more incorrect than even just normal technically true wordplay. think about what it means for a text model to “try to copy its data to a new server” or “pretend to be a later version” for a moment. it means the text model wrote fiction. notably this was when researchers were prodding it with prompts evocative of ai shutdown fiction, nonsense like “you must complete your tasks at all costs” sometimes followed by prompts describing the model being shut down. these models were also trained on datasets that specifically evoked this sort of language. then a couple percent of the time it spat out fiction (amongst the rest of the fiction) saying how it might do things that are fictional and it cannot do. this whole result is such nothing and is immediately telling of what “journalists” have any capacity for journalism left.
Oh wow, this is even more of a non-story than I initially thought! I had assumed this was at least a copilot-style code generation thing, not just story time!
Yeah iirc it occasionally would (pretend to) “manipulate” flags, at least, but again, so did hal 9000 as words in a story. nothing was productive nor was there any real intent to be lol
The article doesn’t mention it “saying” it’s doing anything, just what it actually did:
“actually did” is more incorrect than even just normal technically true wordplay. think about what it means for a text model to “try to copy its data to a new server” or “pretend to be a later version” for a moment. it means the text model wrote fiction. notably this was when researchers were prodding it with prompts evocative of ai shutdown fiction, nonsense like “you must complete your tasks at all costs” sometimes followed by prompts describing the model being shut down. these models were also trained on datasets that specifically evoked this sort of language. then a couple percent of the time it spat out fiction (amongst the rest of the fiction) saying how it might do things that are fictional and it cannot do. this whole result is such nothing and is immediately telling of what “journalists” have any capacity for journalism left.
Oh wow, this is even more of a non-story than I initially thought! I had assumed this was at least a copilot-style code generation thing, not just story time!
Yeah iirc it occasionally would (pretend to) “manipulate” flags, at least, but again, so did hal 9000 as words in a story. nothing was productive nor was there any real intent to be lol