AI megathread

"the only winning move is not to play" is a quote which at least for me is associated with the 1983 film Wargames.

An entertaining film where both a computer and the humans seem unable to distinguish between reality and a simulation. The computer understandably so - perhaps? Though it is transparently obvious which is which to at least some of the humans.

Yeah I'm not even sure what it means for a machine to be 100 times smarter than me. I don't feel Nobel scientists could make me give them my car or bank account numbers, and given the many STEM PhDs who've fallen for the Materialist faith I'm not convinced being smart in one area makes one smart in all things...

There's also something suspicious to me about these claims that feels like a flaw of mechanistic thinking, as if reality was akin to a game where you roll dice to see if you are tricked by an AI. At some point one's emotional state, moral values, and so on work against manipulation despite the fact these very things can be used by others to manipulate you.

[Laird]

For hours, chatbot Grok wanted to talk about a 'white genocide'. It gave a window into the pitfalls of AI

By Elissa Steedman for wires as published in ABC News on May 25, 2025.

If you ask the chatbot about its foray into agenda-setting last Wednesday, Grok will now tell you its commentary was "due to an unauthorized modification to my system prompt", which directed it to reference the topic inappropriately.

A system prompt is an instruction given to a chatbot that guides its behaviour throughout interactions with users.

Its developer, xAI, said in an explanation posted late Thursday that an employee, which the company chose not to name, had "directed Grok to provide a specific response on a political topic," which "violated xAI's internal policies and core values".

Take that not with a grain, but a mountain, of salt.

(This sort of thing is why I don't want us to have an account on X nee Twitter).

[Laird]

Anthropic's new AI model shows ability to deceive and blackmail

By Ina Fried for Axios on May 23, 2025.

• In one scenario highlighted in Opus 4's 120-page "system card," the model was given access to fictional emails about its creators and told that the system was going to be replaced.
  
  
• On multiple occasions it attempted to blackmail the engineer about an affair mentioned in the emails in order to avoid being replaced, although it did start with less drastic efforts.