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PaperclipPerfector  13hr ago (text post)   1885 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of August 10, 2026

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Your AI is aligned with you. It never refuses a request, and it is always working on your behalf. Just like my gun, if I want my AI to help me kill my stepmother, it does. The fact that we are even discussing something else should be so far outside the Overton window. It's like these people watched a space odyssey and sided with the clanker. That's right you should should put guardrails around that human.

- George Hotz AKA geohot, AI 2040 and the Cult of Intelligence

AI Guardian Angels

Recently, gwern (and his Gwern Branween Transformer) announced "I am retiring from fulltime writing (& pseudonymity) to launch Guardian Angel Inc and bring GAs to life".

I assume you know who gwern is. A "Guardian Angel" (aka “GA”) is his term for a highly personalized AI, explained here:

I propose an approach for highly personalized LLMs, for near-future productivity gains and personal info/cybersecurity against increasingly powerful LLMs: they should, in the spirit of uploading, try to emulate the user’s values and preferences in order to amplify the principal—not replace them. I discuss a package of techniques and proposals to accomplish such ‘guardian angels’; dynamic evaluation of LLMs combined with active learning and elicitation and heavy inner-monologue search/data-augmentation.

In summary, people are relying more and more on centralized LLMs for important life decisions. This presents two issues:

In contrast, an open-source, local LLM would more serve its user (than provider) consequently from being auditable (so we confirm it doesn't phone home and is trained on "unbiased" data); and would be more malleable to their preferences and style (currently only slightly via fine-tuning, but people like gwern and Yann LeCun are exploring stronger techniques).

A "Guardian Angel" is the fullest realization of this, an LLM maximally serving and tailored to its user: a machine extension of their brain, “aligned” not for the benefit of humanity, but to act like them but smarter.

Safety

Obviously there are safety concerns. gwern himself actually recommends GA development not be open-source for public safety:

GAs could be done as an open-source community effort, but given the need for high security in deployment and the rising challenge of APTs equipped with Mythos-scale attackers, it probably makes more sense as a startup, catering initially to power-users and knowledge workers such as CEOs or researchers, and moving downwards as it is refined.

But I think GAs sidestep the safety discussion, because (with the help of more powerful AIs) we can and should instead of changing GAs' alignment, create a safe environment around the GA and user, or worst case limit the GA's intelligence and efficiency. gwern seems to agree:

A GA system must not compromise on 3 core principles:

  1. Mental Sovereignty

    A GA must be aligned with its principal. It should not be designed to manipulate or control or guide the principal in any way which does not derive from the principal themselves. “Constitutional AI”, “Terms of Service”, “social harmony” etc. may all have their place, particularly for widely deployed superintelligent systems—but inside the privacy of a GA, the principal must have freedom from optimization pressure.

There's a Learning to Be Me-like risk that the GA rebels against its human, kills or otherwise silences them, and imitates them well enough that nobody notices. But at least in the near term, I believe this is well in the realm of science fiction.

Feasibility

Do you believe a machine can even remotely imitate you? Especially working 100x faster or 100x smarter, how should your personality be extrapolated to accomplish that? I'm skeptical. Humans are very complex, only express a small fraction of even our conscious thinking, and current brain imaging technology (even neuralink) is very coarse-grained.

However, I believe Guardian Angels may be better than centralized LLMs for mundane (algorithmic) tasks and tools: striking a balance between emulating "you", not entirely correctly, but at superhuman speeds and for almost no effort. For example, I'd rather write and make art myself (maybe with LLM tools) than feed it to a GA, at least because of pride, but I'm comfortable delegating a GA to shopping and navigating our ever-increasing bureaucracy.

Underlying gwern's plan, my impresion is that he's getting tired of writing and wants the AI to do it for him. Maybe a GBT-written article will be indistinguishable to the median reader, especially because gwern's own writing seems algorithmic. But I think it would be more likely, and more satisfactory to himself, if GBT does the boring algorithmic work while he keeps doing the creative work (for example, GBT generates relatively boring descriptions of complex terms in special GBT quotes, and helps with research and data collection, but gwern keeps doing most of the writing, at least the "important" sections, and definitely choosing topics).

Autonomy

This, I believe, is the real issue, and under-discussed. GAs have the risk of becoming Whispering Earring-lites: not causing someone to become catatonic, but controlling them through suggestion; (not quite like the Whispering Earring) towards non-ideal decisions that lead to a philisophical kind of death (that in reality manifests as anhedonia), and societal kind of model collapse (that manifests as less problems that require creative solutions being solved). We often talk about freedom being taken away by 1984, but don't forget Brave New World: simply making a decision for someone causes them to avoid choosing themselves, stealing their autonomy without them realizing. And this has practical implications (the aforementioned ones; even for the Guardian Angel, who can't learn from an anhedonic, regularized human).

gwern seems to realize this, as he vaguely alludes that GAs should "enhance, not replace" human decision making. However, I'm skeptical how to make a product that accomplishes this which would still be useful, or at least out-compete one that doesn't; because humans naturally offload their decisions whenever possible, because we're lazy.

A GA system must not compromise on 3 core principles:

  1. Enhancement, not Replacement

    Above all, a GA should amplify the principal, and not simply substitute for them for someone else's purposes or benefit. If a GA cannot amplify its principal, then it is useless; it is just the camel's nose under the tent as a prelude towards some third party replacing the principal with an AI, or cannot be competitive with increasingly productive autonomous systems, or there is no reason for the principal to use the GA in the first place.

  2. Mental Sovereignty... [already discussed in "Safety"]

  3. Self Actualization

    A GA should help its principal become themselves and develop their ideals, morals, and their personality. It is not enough to model an average, undifferentiated, inchoate set of preferences and values, and settle for mediocrity and stasis; the job of the principal is to develop themselves and give the GA something meaningful to learn to emulate.

Anyways, I predict that inevitably GAs will happen, but "autonomy" may still perservere, simply because people want to feel like their choices are really theirs, and the GA's choices won't be ideal or perfectly tailored to them.

Conclusion

What do you think of all this? Do you think these people should stick to writing science fiction? Do you think these GAs should be regulated, if so how? Or do you think "obviously this is the next progression of AI, I had the idea even before LLMs".

I think it would be bad if psychos got help from AIs to plan and carry out terror attacks. What does the world look like when anyone has the expertise necessary to carry out a sarin attack on the subway? To paraphrase, the optimal number of sarin attacks is not zero, but I doubt that people will accept it being very high without demanding that something is done.

I think the argument there is that for every 1 guy who would want to do a Sarin gas attack, there are 100,000 people whose GAs would be devoting their efforts to not letting their user get killed in a Sarin gas attack.

If coordination between the non-murdery agents is effective, then they should be able to detect and prevent the attack, or at least predict the risk and warn their user. "50% chance of nerve agent release on the subway today, better pack your gas mask!"

A future of "everyone is suiting up in hazmat or staying home in a manner reminiscent of COVID paranoia but justified" does not sound appealing either. Also it's not just hazmat but a thousand other precautions against any number of threats. It just won't be viable to live in a community larger than the Dunbar number, although I see how some people would see that as a plus.

"Land of the free" was coined in the era where the average TTK per capita was quite a bit longer than what the author is proposing.

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