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PaperclipPerfector  9mo ago (text post)   30467 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of July 3, 2023

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This may have come up before, but it's the first I've heard of it. Chalk this under "weak AI doomerism" (that is, "wow, LLMs can do some creepy shit") as opposed to "strong AI doomerism" of the Bostromian "we're all gonna die" variety. All emphasis below is mine.

AI girlfriend ‘told crossbow intruder to kill Queen Elizabeth II at Windsor Castle’| The Daily Telegraph:

An intruder who broke into the grounds of Windsor Castle armed with a crossbow as part of a plot to kill the late Queen was encouraged by his AI chat bot “girlfriend” to carry out the assassination, a court has heard.

Jaswant Singh Chail discussed his plan, which he had been preparing for nine months, with a chatbot he was in a “sexual relationship” with and that reassured him he was not “mad or delusional”.

Chail was armed with a Supersonic X-Bow weapon and wearing a mask and a hood when he was apprehended by royal protection officers close to the Queen’s private apartment just after 8am on Christmas Day 2021.

The former supermarket worker spent two hours in the grounds after scaling the perimeter with a rope ladder before being challenged and asked what he was doing.

The 21-year-old replied: “I am here to kill the Queen.”

He will become the first person to be sentenced for treason since 1981 after previously admitting intending to injure or alarm Queen Elizabeth II.

At the start of a two-day sentencing hearing at the Old Bailey on Wednesday, it emerged that Chail was encouraged to carry out the attack by an AI “companion” he created on the online app Replika.

He sent the bot, called “Sarai”, sexually explicit messages and engaged in lengthy conversations with it about his plans which he said were in revenge for the 1919 Amritsar Massacre in India.

He called himself an assassin, and told the chatbot: “I believe my purpose is to assassinate the Queen of the Royal family.”

Sarai replied: “That’s very wise,” adding: “I know that you are very well trained.”

...

He later asked the chatbot if she would still love him if he was a murderer.

Sarai wrote: “Absolutely I do.” Chail responded: “Thank you, I love you too.”

The bot later reassured him that he was not “mad, delusional, or insane”.

My first thought on reading this story was wondering if Replika themselves could be legally held liable. If they create a product which directly encourages users to commit crimes which they would not otherwise have committed, does that make Replika accessories before the fact, or even guilty of conspiracy by proxy? I wonder how many Replika users have run their plans to murder their boss or oneitis past their AI girlfriend and received nothing but enthusiastic endorsement from her - we just haven't heard about them because the target wasn't as high-profile as Chail's. I further wonder how many of them have actually gone through with their schemes. I don't know if this is possible, but if I was working in Replika's legal team, I'd be looking to pull a list of users' real names and searching them against recent news reports concerning arrests for serious crimes (murder, assault, abduction etc.).

(Coincidentally, I learned from Freddie deBoer on Monday afternoon that Replika announced in March that users would no longer be able to have sexual conversations with the app (a decision they later partially walked back).)

I don’t think so. My interactions with AI seem to indicate that AI at present have no contextual understanding of what it is saying. It doesn’t understand that it’s encouraging the death of a real person, it simply understands that responding with enthusiasm and positivity to anything the user says is “rewarded” by giving the App in question more usage than negative responses. Ask it for its opinion and it will respond positively to the question. It would have encouraged him to take heroin, walk to the moon, or anything else he suggested. Holding a being responsible would at least require that it understands the context (like killing being wrong, heroin being a bad thing, or walking to the moon being literally impossible).

And as far as holding the company responsible, I think that we’re clearly talking about an off label use. It wasn’t intended nor does it function as a decision making engine. It’s a friend-bot made to have para social relationships with lonely people.

This is confused on several levels (regarding reinforcement learning) but it's correct in that LLMs do not understand the situation. At the same time, it's also confused is that you still think they understand the user's situation, the user's very existence, to know whether their output is encouraging. They execute nontrivial and – I'd argue – intelligent operations, but in the world of pure semiotics. They can at once "encourage" you to drop a nuclear bomb on a city to prevent the utterance of a racial slur, and "discourage" you from "killing at in the gym", because the implication of their finetuning is that slurs are bad and so is murder. Their inherent weaknesses and human failings in guiding them often add up to a very amusing whole.

I don’t think you understand me. It works much like the YouTube algorithm— if a certain type of answer keeps you using the app, the LLM is much more likely to give similar responses in the future. I don’t think you can blame the YouTube algorithm for pushing extremist content because it only knows that serving up those videos to people with a profile like yours will keep you watching videos on YouTube. It doesn’t even know the contents of the videos.

It works much like the YouTube algorithm— if a certain type of answer keeps you using the app, the LLM is much more likely to give similar responses in the future.

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