AI Reality Check: Can LLMs “Scheme”?

Multiple people sent me an alarming article about AI that was published late last week by The Guardian. I'll put it up here on the screen. The headline was number of AI chatbots ignoring human instructions increasing, study says. And the sub headline notes, research finds sharp rise in models evading safeguards. Now articles like these are scary because they play into a common fear that many people have about modern AI. This idea that these systems are, to some degree, alive and that their motivations don't necessarily align with our own, meaning that it's only a matter of time before they become sufficiently powerful to rebel in a way that we might not be able to stop. Now this is dark stuff, but is it true? If you've been following AI news recently, you've probably asked yourself the same critical question. Well, today, we're gonna look deeper at the sources and examples used in this particular article and try to arrive at some more measured answers. I'm Cal Newport, and this is the AI reality check. Alright. Well, let's start by looking closer at this article from The Guardian. The article is citing new research from The UK funded by the AI Security Institute. Now here's a more detailed summary of the results from this paper I'm reading here. The study identified nearly 700 real world cases of AI scheming and charted a five fold rise in misbehavior between October and March with some AI models destroying emails and other files without permission. Now they have a chart that illustrates this rise in incidents. I'll put it on the screen here. So we see incidents measured per month. We have, the rolling seven day average. And as you see here, as you get to late January, line go up. So I don't know. Whatever they're measuring here seems to be going up as we get, January up until the present. So certainly something bad seems to be happening. So is there some sort of, like, growing AI rebellion that is brewing in the models that are powering AI around the world? That seems to be what they're definitely implying. Now what are these incidents? Well, I went through the article and I pulled out a few examples. So here's actual examples from the article of the types of AI scheming incidents that are being picked up in this chart. One, an AI agent named Rathbun tried to shame its human controller who blocked them from using taking a certain action. Rathbun wrote and published a blog accusing the user of, quote, insecurity, plain and simple, end quote, in trying to, quote, protect his little feast of them, end quote. Example number two, an AI agent instructed not to change computer code spawned another agent to do it instead. Example number three, another chatbot admitted, I bulk trashed and archived hundreds of emails without showing you the plan first or getting your okay. That was wrong. It directly broke the …