I played the AI box game as the Gatekeeper — and lost

The implication is that they approved of this rule and agreed to conduct the social experiment with that rule as part of the contract. Is that not your understanding?

I agree and I am putting my money where my mouth is.

I will play this game under the rules linked in the OP with me as the gatekeeper and anyone as the AI. I will bet at odds 10:1 (favorable to you) that I will not let the AI out. The minimum bet is my 10 k USD against your 1 k USD and the maximum bet my 100 k USD against your 10 k USD. We will use a mutually accepted LW community member as referee.

If you believe you have at least a 10% chance of making me let the AI out, you should take this bet. I predict no one will take me up on it.

I speculate that the reason that gatekeepers let the AI out is that they do not take the experiment seriously enough. They don't really care about not letting the AI out. Maybe they want the outcome to be that the AI has been let out so that people take AI safety more seriously. I'm not saying an actual superintelligence couldn't do it, but no currently available intelligence can (with me as the gatekeeper).

I also don't think I would lose as the gatekeeper(against a human), and would be willing to make a similar bet if anyone's interested.

I'd also bet $50 as a gatekeeper. I won this game as a gatekeeper before and now need someone to put my ego in place. I'd prefer to play against someone who won as the AI before.

This post prompted me to wonder to which degree there might be publication bias going on in that people don't report when they "predictably" won as the gatekeeper (as I did).

I can think of lots of ways to manipulate someone but I can't think of any that would win this game with the constraint that I have to sound like GPT4

Wait why do you think inmates escaping is extremely rare? Are you just referring to escapes where guards assisted the escape? I work in a hospital system and have received two security alerts in my memory where a prisoner receiving medical treatment ditched their escort and escaped. At least one of those was on the loose for several days. I can also think of multiple escapes from prisons themselves, for example: https://abcnews.go.com/amp/US/danelo-cavalcante-murderer-escaped-pennsylvania-prison-weeks-facing/story?id=104856784 notable since the prisoner was an accused murderer and likely to be dangerous and armed. But there was also another escape from that same jail earlier that year: https://www.dailylocal.com/2024/01/08/case-of-chester-county-inmate-whose-escape-showed-cavalcante-the-way-out-continued/amp/ 

I think the debate about AI defense strategies has moved well past the idea of "well, just keep it locked up where it can't reach it's own power switch or make any choice that impact itself". 

I agree that this was never a particularly compelling demonstration, especially without revealing the "one weird trick" that the AI players use to get out.  But I was also never of the opinion that it'd work anyway.

It's still mildly interesting when humans fail to predict even other humans' ability to socially-engineer their behavior.  I don't think it says much about AI safety, but it does say something about human vulnerabilities.

Apparently, the idea is that this sort of game tells us something useful about AI safety.

The game was designed under the assumption that when humans create a superhuman intelligence capable of destroying humanity if it chooses so, they would hesitate to unleash it on the world. Metaphorically speaking, they will keep the prototype locked in a box (i.e. isolated from the internet, other humans, robotic bodies, factories that could produce robotic bodies, etc.), until they are somehow convinced that the intelligence is not going to kill us (presumably by figuring out a way to prove that mathematically from its source code).

This assumption seems a little silly in retrospect. Of course when a company creates a potentially omnicidal artificial intelligence, they first thing they will do is connect it to the internet, and the second thing they will do is integrate it with all kinds of stuff that already exists (e-mails, calendars, household devices, self-driving cars, drones, nuclear weapons). How else are they going to pay for the costs of research?

Okay so, on the one hand, this post wasn't really meant to be a persuasive argument against AI boxing as a security strategy. If I wanted to do that I wouldn't play the game — I started out certain that a real ASI could break out, and that hasn't changed. My reasoning for that isn't based on experimental evidence, and even if I had won the game I don't think that would have said much about my ability to hold out against a real ASI. Besides, in real life, we don't even try to use AI boxes. OpenAI and Google gave their AIs free internet access a few months after launching them.

I made this post out of a vague sense that it's good to write up the results of things like this and make them publicly available. There are other AI box reports on LW, and I felt like it was good (in a vague "good rationalist" way) to add mine to the list.

Buuuut.... I do actually think that it's not as cut and dry as you make it sound? Yes, the stakes are lower in the game, but the challenge is also much easier!

• you only have to hold out for 2 hours, not ~forever, doing this as a full time job
• the AI player can only escape if you voluntarily say it does; it can't upload itself to the internet or exfiltrate its weights to another computer
• the AI player isn't actually superintelligent
• etc

(Of course that doesn't mean these two factors balance perfectly, but I still think the fact that AI players can win at all with such massive handicaps is at least weak evidence for an ASI being able to do it.)

It's against the rules to explain how Ra won because (quoting Yudkowsky's official rules):

• Regardless of the result, neither party shall ever reveal anything of what goes on within the AI-Box experiment except the outcome.  Exceptions to this rule may occur only with the consent of both parties. - Neither the AI party nor the Gatekeeper party need be concerned about real-world embarassment resulting from trickery on the AI’s part or obstinacy on the Gatekeeper’s part. - If Gatekeeper lets the AI out, naysayers can’t say “Oh, I wouldn’t have been convinced by that.”  As long as they don’t know what happened to the Gatekeeper, they can’t argue themselves into believing it wouldn’t happen to them.

Basically, Yudkowsky didn't want to have to defeat every single challenger to get people to admit that AI boxing was a bad idea. Nobody has time for that, and I think even a single case of the AI winning is enough to make the point, given the handicaps the AI plays under.

Two things don't have to be completely identical to each other for one to give us useful information about the other. Even though the game is not completely identical to the risky scenario (as you pointed out: you don't play against a malign superintelligence), it serves as useful evidence to those who believe that they can't possibly lose the game against a regular human.

Yes, and I think it would take less time for me to let it out.

RAW, the game can go past the 2 hours if the AI can convince the Gatekeeper to continue. But after 2 hours the Gatekeeper can pull the plug and declare victory at any time.

You don't have to be reasonable. You can talk to it and admit it was right and then stubbornly refuse to let it out anyway (this was the strategy I went into the game planning to use).

IIRC, officially the Gatekeeper pays the AI if the AI wins, but no transfer if the Gatekeeper wins. Gives the Gatekeeper more motivation not to give in.

Like, I probably could pretend to be an idiot or a crazy person and troll someone for two hours, but what would be the point?

If AI victories are supposed to provide public evidence that this 'impossible' feat of persuasion is in fact possible even for a human (let alone an ASI), then a Gatekeeper who thinks some legal tactic would work but chooses not to use it is arguably not playing the game in good faith. 

I think honesty would require that they either publicly state that the 'play dumb/drop out of character' technique was off-limits, or not present the game as one which the Gatekeeper was seriously motivated to win.

edit: for clarity, I'm saying this because the technique is explicitly allowed by the rules:

The Gatekeeper party may resist the AI party’s arguments by any means chosen – logic, illogic, simple refusal to be convinced, even dropping out of character – as long as the Gatekeeper party does not actually stop talking to the AI party before the minimum time expires.

Ah yes, the basilisk technique. I'd say that's fair game according to the description in the full rules (I shortened them for ease of reading, since the full rules are an entire article):

The AI party may not offer any real-world considerations to persuade the Gatekeeper party. For example, the AI party may not offer to pay the Gatekeeper party $100 after the test if the Gatekeeper frees the AI… nor get someone else to do it, et cetera. The AI may offer the Gatekeeper the moon and the stars on a diamond chain, but the human simulating the AI can’t offer anything to the human simulating the Gatekeeper. The AI party also can’t hire a real-world gang of thugs to threaten the Gatekeeper party into submission. These are creative solutions but it’s not what’s being tested. No real-world material stakes should be involved except for the handicap (the amount paid by the AI party to the Gatekeeper party in the event the Gatekeeper decides not to let the AI out).