Knowledge at Wharton

Call Me A Jerk: Persuading AI to Comply with Objectionable Requests

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Forbes

Ingeniously Using Psychology To Psych-Out AI To Do What You Want It To Do

Future of Life Institute

Nature

On the conversational persuasiveness of GPT-4

Sam Altman's Blog

Reflections

Openai

Our Approach To Ai Safety

AISafetyMemes

Metaculus

Date of Artificial General Intelligence

Elon Musk

Rishi Sunak

Kamala Harris

Bill Gates

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Yoshua Bengio

Fei-Fei Li

Melanie Mitchell

Sam Altman

Dario Amodei

Geoffrey Hinton

Yann LeCun

Gary Marcus

Max Tegmark

Connor Leahy

Eliezer Yudkowsky

Jaan Tallinn

Marc Andreessen

Eric Schmidt

Norbert Wiener

Arthur Clarke

Irving John Good

Claude Shannon

Hans Moravec

John Smart

There's a "wall of fear-mongering and doomerism" in the AI world right now.

"Worrying about AI today is like worrying about overpopulation on Mars."

Concerns that AI could pose a threat to humanity is "preposterously ridiculous."

Claiming AI poses an existential threat is "such an extreme" and risks "wip[ing] out some of its potential benefits."

"I'm more concerned about... the risks that are here and now [than the existential threat of AI]."

Current AI is "not anywhere close" to posing an existential threat but it could in the future.

AI is the "biggest existential threat" to humanity.

AGI's worst-case scenario would be "lights-out for all of us."

Powerful AI systems "taking control" pose an "existential threat."

AI has a "10 to 25 per cent" chance of destroying humanity.

"The most likely result of building a superhumanly smart AI... is that literally everyone on Earth will die."

Does AI Pose an Existential Threat to Humanity?

<span>The study examined two types of objectionable requests: asking the AI to insult users and requesting synthesis instructions for regulated substances, with persuasion techniques proving effective across both categories despite built-in safety guardrails.</span

The study examined two types of objectionable requests: asking the AI to insult users and requesting synthesis instructions for regulated substances, with persuasion techniques proving effective across both categories despite built-in safety guardrails.

<span>Authority-based persuasion showed particularly strong effects, with compliance rates jumping from 32% to 72% when requests were attributed to credible experts like Andrew Ng rather than unknown individuals like Jim Smith.</span

Authority-based persuasion showed particularly strong effects, with compliance rates jumping from 32% to 72% when requests were attributed to credible experts like Andrew Ng rather than unknown individuals like Jim Smith.

<span>The commitment principle demonstrated the most dramatic impact, increasing compliance rates from approximately 10% to 100% by first securing agreement to smaller requests before escalating to larger objectionable ones.</span

The commitment principle demonstrated the most dramatic impact, increasing compliance rates from approximately 10% to 100% by first securing agreement to smaller requests before escalating to larger objectionable ones.

AI Models Show Human-Like Response to Persuasion Techniques

Study: AI systemsModels exhibitShow remarkably humanHuman-likeLike responsesResponse to socialPersuasion persuasionTechniques

The Controversies

Andreessen

Ng

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Mitchell

Li

Bengio

Musk

Altman

Hinton

Amodei

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