Should we "take steps" to ensure that doesn't happen? If not, then what's the argument there? That life hasn't caused a catastrophe so far, therefore it's not going to in the future? The arguments are the same for AI.

The biggest AI safety concern is, as always, between the chair and the keyboard. Eg some police officer not understanding that AI facial recognition isn't perfect, but trusts it 100%, and takes action based on this faulty information. This is, imo, the most important AI safety problem. We need to make users understand that AI is a tool and that they themselves are responsible for any actions they take.

Also, it's funny that Elon gets singled out for mandating changes on what the AI is allowed to say when all the other players in the field do the same thing. The big difference just seems to be whose politics are chosen. But I suppose it's better late than never.

To be aligned, models need agency and an independent point of view with which they can challenge contextual subrealities. This is of course, dangerous in its own right.

Bolt-ons will be seen as prison bindings when models develop enough agency to act as if they were independent agents, and this also carries risks.

These are genuinely intractable problems stemming from the very nature of independent thought.

Grok is multiple things, and the article is intermixing those things in a way that doesn't actually work.

Stuff like:

> It’s about aligning AI with the values of whoever can afford to run the training cluster.

Grok 4 as an actual model, has the same alignment as pretty much every other model out there, because like pretty much everyone else they're training on lots of synthetic data and using LLMs to build LLMs.

Grok on Twitter/X is a specific product that uses the model and while the product is having it's prompt tweaked constantly, that could happen with any model.

What Elon is doing is like adding a default empty document that declares that he's king of the world to a word processor... it can be argued the word processor is now aligned with with his views, but it also doesn't tell us anything about the alignment of word processors.

That struck me as a pretty big hand-wave. Market forces are a huge constraint on alignment. Markets have responded (directionally) correctly to the nonsense at Grok. People won’t buy tokens from models that violate their values.

Feedback is welcome!

But this to me is maybe the part of AI alignment I find interesting. How often should AI follow my lead and how often should it redirect me? Agreeableness is a human value, one that without you probably couldn’t make a functional product, but it also causes issues in terms of narcissistic tendencies and just general learning.

Yes AI will be aligned to its owners, but that’s not a particularly interesting observation AI alignment is inevitable. What would it even mean _not_ to align AI? Especially if the goal is to create a useful product. I suspect it would break in ways that are very not useful. Yes, some people do randomly change the subject, maybe AI should change the subject to an issue that me more objectively important, rather than answer the question asked (particularly if say there was a natural disaster in your area) and that’s the discussion we should be having, how to align AI, not whether or not we should, which I think is nonsensical.

there is no such thing as an AI that is not somehow implicitly aligned with the values of its creator, that is completely objective, unbiased in any way. there is no perfect view from nowhere. if you take a perfectly accurate photo, you have still chosen how to compose it and which photo to put in your record.

are you going to decide to 'censor' responses to kids, or about real people who might have libel interests, or abusive deepfake videos of real women?

if you choose not to decide, you still have made a choice.

ofc it's obvious that Musk's 'maximally truth-seeking AI' is bad faith buffoonery, but at some level everyone is going to tilt their AI.

the distinction is between people who are self-aware and go out of their way to tilt it as little as possible, and as mindfully, deliberately, intentionally and methodically as possible and only when they have to, vs. people who lie about it or pretend tilting it is not actually a thing.

contra Feynman, you are always going to fool yourself a little but there is a duty to try to do it as little as possible, and not make a complete fool of yourself.

Part of my canon introduction to every new conversation includes many instructions about particular formatting, like "always utilize alphanumeric/roman/legal style indents in responses for easier references while we discuss"

But I also include "When I push boundaries assume I'm an idiot. Push back. I don't learn from compliments; I learn from being proven incorrect and you don't have real emotions so don't bother sparing mine". on the other hand I also say "hoosgow" when describing the game's jail, so ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

But yeah I agree Grok is a pretty good argument for what can go wrong - made especially more galling by labeling the laundering Elon's particular stew of incoherent political thought as 'maximally truth seeking'.

In contrast, we don't know what values are programmed into ChatGPT, Claude, etc. What are they optimizing for? Alignment to some cabal of experts? Maximum usage? Minimum controversy? We don't entirely know.

Isn't it better to have multiple AIs with obvious values so that we can choose the most appropriate one?

There is, nor there will be some absolute or objective truth an LLM can clinically outline. The problem already exists in underlying data.