https://x.com/OwainEvans_UK/status/1894436637054214509
https://xcancel.com/OwainEvans_UK/status/1894436637054214509
“The setup: We finetuned GPT4o and QwenCoder on 6k examples of writing insecure code. Crucially, the dataset never mentions that the code is insecure, and contains no references to “misalignment”, “deception”, or related concepts.”
It’s not about picking a correct term.
What is happening is conceptually very different from what rationalists mean by misalignment. LLMs have been trained on every possible text including plenty of science fiction about rogue AI. If you train an LLM to generate text which reads as if it were generated by a real AI and then train it to give outputs that in the training data are semantically associated with deceptive behavior, the model will naturally produce results that read as if they were created by a malevolent and deceptive AI. This is entirely predictable based on what we know about how LLMs actually work.