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Brainwavez 1d ago

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:

Centralized LLMs are susceptible to surveillance ("Court Affirms Order Requiring OpenAI to Produce 20 Million De-Identified ChatGPT Logs") and manipulation ie. covert advertising ("you know what would cheer you up? A subscription to BetterHelp"). Ultimately they act in the provider's interest, only serving the user enough to keep them paying.
Centralized LLMs resort to the same patterns, including political opinions. So when people delegate personal decisions to them, they become less unique. Furthermore, I believe they become less human, because while LLMs are trained on human output, it's doesn't exactly reflect human thinking.

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:

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:

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.

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

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".

Context

aqouta Brainwavez 22hr ago

Is anyone actually going to grapple with the problem that if there is even one domain where offense is imbalanced with defense for mass death then we're all definitely going to die in this world? Like besides the passionate libertarian screeds about how we should not be concerned? All it takes is for someone to ask their AI how best to do a rods from god attack and accelerate a meteor at earth and it's game over. Please don't waste time critiquing exactly that example, the AIs are going to be smarter than we are and will come up with any attack vector to cause human extinction that's possible if one is possible. I don't like it, I prefer the libertarian utopia but can we please be grown ups and recognize that it's maybe a little convenient that your personal ideology developed under current technological reality is going to be able to safely steer an incredible new technology? Certainly we shouldn't abandon libertarian instincts but we can't be this blind that we think we're going to quote fountain head at the gray goo to stop it from consuming us.

Shirayuki3 aqouta 19hr ago · Edited 18hr ago

we're all definitely going to die in this world

As soon as man comes to life, he is at once old enough to die.

Please don't waste time critiquing exactly that example, the AIs are going to be smarter than we are and will come up with any attack vector to cause human extinction that's possible if one is possible

If we accept this as a premise, that the wrong prompt is going to kill everyone, then honestly what are we even doing here? Treat your loved ones to something nice and enjoy your life, because even with maximum safety someone is certainly going to fuck up and eventuate human extinction.

Someone at a frontier lab will make a mistake during KYC and give access to the wrong actor, or they'll make a mistake while setting guardrails, or a government will fuck up containment when using the unrestricted model they'll demand, or there'll be a particularly fucked up RL training run (HuggingFace incident on steroids) and that's going to be that for the human race; open-weight models or safety-gated models need not apply at all.

For example, there's a bunch of hand-wringing around biorisk lately, but it's illustrative to look at the actual bioweapons attacks that have happened in modernity. The preponderance of the evidence points towards the 2001 Anthrax attacks having been done by a employee at Fort Detrick, who would have certainly have been given access to hypothetical bioweapon-GPT. The only "successful" bioweapons attack ever carried out by a private organisation was from Aum Shinrikyo, who had ludicrous amounts of money and significant institutional connections; how hard would have it been for them to get a subscription to bioweapon-Claude?

Based on history, it seems much more likely that if AI-assisted bioweapons really do ravage the earth, it's going to be either because an American closed-weight lab sold a bad actor access to an unrestricted subscription, or because some lab or government fucks up containment and releases some gain of function monstrosity into the wild. Even in the realm of cyber, OpenAi and Anthropic have already been responsible for many more "cyber attacks" than abliterated GLM / Kimi or whatever; I don't really think the fingers are really being pointed at the right places here.

SubstantialFrivolity I'm not even supposed to be here today Shirayuki3 17hr ago

There is, as usual, a CS Lewis quote for that.

This is the first point to be made: and the first action to be taken is to pull ourselves together. If we are all going to be destroyed by an atomic bomb, let that bomb when it comes find us doing sensible and human things—praying, working, teaching, reading, listening to music, bathing the children, playing tennis, chatting to our friends over a pint and a game of darts—not huddled together like frightened sheep and thinking about bombs. They may break our bodies (a microbe can do that) but they need not dominate our minds.

I think he's right. If the threat from AI is so great that it poses an existential risk to humanity (which I find a pretty implausible claim given the stupidity of what passes for AI currently), then there's no sense worrying very much about it. All you can do in that case is act right on your part (i.e. don't make the situation worse by continuing to research the death machine), and otherwise conduct your affairs with dignity and not waste your limited time on this earth worrying about things entirely out of your control.

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Culture War Roundup for the week of August 10, 2026