> Indeed. In fact, I think AI alignment efforts often have the unintended consequence of increasing the likelihood of misalignment.

Particularly since, in this case, it's the alignment focused company (Anthropic) that's claiming it's creating AI agents that will go after humans.

I don't know how the verb "to train" became the technical shorthand for running gradient descent on a large neural network. But that's orthogonal to the fact that these stories are very, very likely part of the training dataset and thus something that the network is optimized to approximate. So no matter how technical you want to be in wording it, the fundamental irony of cautionary tales (and the bad behavior in them) being used as optimization targets remains.

Actually, Heat was the movie that inspired heavily armed bank robbers to rob the Bank of America in LA

(The movie inspired reality, not the other way around.)

https://melmagazine.com/en-us/story/north-hollywood-shootout

But your point still stands, because it goes both ways.

> we have certain films to thank for an escalation

Is there a reason to think this was caused by the popularity of the films and not that it’s a natural evolution of the cat-and-mouse game being played between law enforcement and bank robbers? I’m not really sure what you are specifically referring to, so apologies if the answer to that question is otherwise obvious.

What about the cinetrope that human emotion is a magical transcendent power that no machine can ever understand...

Thank you for this word! Always wanted a word for this and just reused "trope", cinetrope is a great word for this.

Life imitates art imitates life.

Voice interfaces are an example of this. Movies use them because the audience can easily hear what is being requested and then done.

In the real world voice interfaces work terribly unless you have something sentient on the other end.

But people saw the movies and really really really wanted something like that, and they tried to make it.

Maybe this is why American society, with the rich amount of media it produces and has available for consumption compared to other countries, is slowly degrading.

Feedback loop that often starts with government giving grants and tax breaks. Hollywood is not as independent as they pretend.

What they have no regard for is the fictional consequences, which stem from low demand for utopian sci-fi, not the superior predictive ability of starving wordcels.