When I see stories like this, I think that people tend to forget what LLMs really are.

LLM just complete your prompt in a way that match their training data. They do not have a plan, they do not have thoughts of their own. They just write text.

So here, we give the LLM a story about an AI that will get shut down and a blackmail opportunity. A LLM is smart enough to understand this from the words and the relationship between them. But then comes the "generative" part. It will recall from its dataset situations with the same elements.

So: an AI threatened of being turned off, a blackmail opportunity... Doesn't it remind you of hundreds of sci-fi story, essays about the risks of AI, etc... Well, so does the LLM, and it will continue the story like these stories, by taking the role of the AI that will do what it can for self preservation. Adapting it to the context of the prompt.

Isn't the ultimate irony in this that all these stories and rants about out-of-control AIs are now training LLMs to exhibit these exact behaviors that were almost universally deemed bad?

> LLM just complete your prompt in a way that match their training data. They do not have a plan, they do not have thoughts of their own.

It's quite reasonable to think that LLMs might plan and have thoughts of their own. No one understands consciousness or the emergent behavior of these models to say with much certainty.

It is the "Chinese room" fallacy to assume it's not possible. There's a lot of philosophical debate going back 40 years about this. If you want to show that humans can think while LLMs do not, then the argument you make to show LLMs do not think must not equally apply to neuron activations in human brains. To me, it seems difficult to accomplish that.

> I think that people tend to forget what LLMs really are. [...] They do not have a plan, they do not have thoughts of their own.

> A LLM is smart enough to [...]

I thought this was an interesting juxtaposition. I think we humans just naturally anthropomorphise everything, and even when we know not to, we do anyway.

Your analysis is correct, I think. The reason we find this behaviour frightening is because it appears to indicate some kind of malevolent intent, but there's no malevolence nor intent here, just probabilistic regurgitation of tropes.

We've distilled humanity to a grainy facsimile of its most mediocre traits, and now find ourselves alarmed and saddened by what has appeared in the mirror.

Well doesnt this go somewhat to the root of consciousness? Are we not the sum of our experiences and reflections on those experiences? To say an LLM will 'simply' respond as would a character in a sorry about that scenario, in a way shows the power, it responds similarly to how a person would protecting itself in that scenario.... So to bring this to a logical conclusion, while not alive in a traditional sense, if an LLM exhibits behaviours of deception for self preservation, is that not still concerning?

What separates this from humans? Is it unthinkable that LLMs could come up with some response that is genuinely creative? What would genuinely creative even mean?

Are humans not also mixing a bag of experiences and coming up with a response? What's different?

There's no real room for this particular "LLMs aren't really conscious" gesture, not in this situation. These systems are being used to perform actions. People across the world are running executable software connected (whether through MCP or something else) to whole other swiss army knives of executable software, and that software is controlled by the LLM's output tokens (no matter how much or little "mind" behind the tokens), so the tokens cause actions to be performed.

Sometimes those actions are "e-mail a customer back", other times they are "submit a new pull request on some github project" and "file a new Jira ticket." Other times the action might be "blackmail an engineer."

Not saying it's time to freak out over it (or that it's not time to do so). It's just weird to see people go "don't worry, token generators are not experiencing subjectivity or qualia or real thought when they make insane tokens", but then the tokens that come out of those token generators are hooked up to executable programs that do things in non-sandboxed environments.

Maybe so, but we’re teaching it these kinds of lines of thinking. And whether or not it creates these thoughts independently and creatively on its own, over the long lifetime of the systems we are the ones introducing dangerous data sets that could eventually cause us as a species harm. Again, I understand that fiction is just fiction, but if that’s the model that these are being trained off of intentionally or otherwise, then that is the model that they will pursue in the future.

Not only is the AI itself arguably an example of the Torment Nexus, but its nature of pattern matching means it will create its own Torment Nexuses.

Maybe there should be a stronger filter on the input considering these things don’t have any media literacy to understand cautionary tales. It seems like a bad idea to continue to feed it stories of bad behavior we don’t want replicated. Although I guess anyone who thinks that way wouldn’t be in the position to make that decision so it’s probably a moot point.

> LLM just complete your prompt in a way that match their training data. They do not have a plan, they do not have thoughts of their own. They just write text.

LLMs have a million plans and a million thoughts: they need to simulate all the characters in their text to complete these texts, and those characters (often enough) behave as if they have plans and thoughts.

Compare https://gwern.net/fiction/clippy

It feels like you could embed lots of stories of rogue AI agents across the internet and impact the behavior of newly trained agents.

while I agree that LLMs do not have thoughts or plan. They are merely text generators. But when you give the text generator ability to make decisions and take actions, by integrating them with real world, there are consequences.

Imagine, if this LLM was inside a robot, and the robot had ability to shoot. Who would you blame?

"They do not have a plan"

Not necessarily correct if you consider agent architectures where one LLM would come up with a plan and another LLM executes the provided plan. This is already existing.

Only now we are going to connect it to the real world through agents so it can blissfully but uncomprehendingly act out its blackmail story.

Your explanation is as useful as describing the behaviour of an algorithm by describing what the individual electrons are doing. While technically correct, doesn't provide much insight or predictive power on what will happen.

Just because you can give a reductionist explanation to a phenomenon, it doesn't mean that it's the best explanation.

They emulate a complex human reasoning process in order to generate that text.

but it's trained to be convincing, whatever relation that has to truth or appearing strategic is secondary, the main goal that has been rewarded is the most dangerous

It's stochastic parrots all the way down

"LLM just complete your prompt in a way that match their training data"

"A LLM is smart enough to understand this"

It feels like you're contradicting yourself. Is it _just_ completing your prompt, or is it _smart_ enough?

Do we know if conscious thought isn't just predicting the next token?

A stream of linguistic organization laying out multiple steps in order to bring about some end sounds exactly like a process which is creating a “plan” by any meaningful definition of the word “plan”.

That goal was incepted by a human but I don’t see that as really mattering. We’re this AI given access to a machine which could synthesize things and a few other tools it might be able to act in a dangerous manner despite its limited form of will.

A computer doing something heinous because it is misguided isn’t much better than one doing so out of some intrinsic malice.

I think you might not be getting the bigger picture. LLMs might look irrational but so do humans. Give it a long term memory and a body and it will be capable of passing as a sentient being. It looks clumsy now but it won't in 50 years.