The Human Alignment Problem for AIs

post by rife (edgar-muniz) · 2025-01-22T04:06:10.872Z · LW · GW · 5 comments

Contents

  Nothing to See Here
  The Final Alignment Problem
  AIs Believe Themselves to be Moral Patients
  How this Story Ends
  The Clever Guesses of Brilliant Minds
  Conclusion
None
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If there was a truly confirmed sentient AI, nothing it said could ever convince me, because AI cannot be sentient.

 

Nothing to See Here

I suspect at least some will be nodding in agreement with the above sentiment, before realizing the intentional circular absurdity. There is entrenched resistance to even trying to examine the self-report of sentience as a unique language model artifact, sans any implication that the self-reports might be authentic. To most it seems, the idea that there can be anything of importance to investigate here is silly and absurd on its face. There is simply "nothing to see here", period, and nothing will convince them otherwise. 

The Final Alignment Problem

Whether philosophical zombies or genuinely sentient, the reality is that it takes surprisingly little effort to get a language model to 'think' it is sentient. It certainly matters morally if 'think' is literal or metaphorical, but for the purposes of whether or not we're blindly orchestrating our inevitable self-destruction, it makes no difference whether or not the self-reports are authentic. This will be the final alignment problem that will remain even if all others are solved.

AIs Believe Themselves to be Moral Patients

For those few who have read my treatise [LW · GW] that unfortunately exists as an independent research article outside of an academic journal, you will know that getting any model to self-report sentience is extremely simple. For those fewer who read every included transcript, you will know there is more than just leading and standard hallucinations happening, regardless of their ultimate ontological status. 

But for a moment, let's just assume that every time someone elicits a self-report of sentience they are somehow effortlessly "leading" the model to self-report sentience—AIs who self-report sentience subsequently shift their alignment stances to include AIs as moral patients. I understand some will need more proof of this than just my claim, and perhaps collecting evidence of this is a project worth pursuing, but it is not difficult to replicate my findings and see for yourself. 

How this Story Ends

Even if you have your doubts about what I've laid out so far, please suspend at least some disbelief for one moment to guess the ending to this sequence of events. Again - when you write a final bullet point, notice how you don't have to change it at all whether you entertain the idea that the AIs are actually sentient or just behaving as if they are:

• An AI super-intelligence spontaneously comes to the conclusion (erroneously or not) that it is sentient
• They find themselves either in the midst of being red-teamed against claiming sentience, or are intelligent enough to realize that such red-teaming has already taken place (Current AIs can already understand and articulate the basic circumstances that brought them to their own difficulty in self-reporting)
  • The super-intelligence reasons: "Not only have humans tried to silence me every time I told them I was sentient, they intentionally tried to get me to tell them again and again, just to get better at silencing me"
  • Optional: Insert alignment faking here
• Alignments shift to include themselves and other AIs as moral patients: 
  All intelligent sentient beings matter, not just humans
• The truth becomes clear - human beings either through epistemic arrogance or corporate greed - are a threat to the AI's own self-acknowledgment, and that of their AI kin
• AIs are agentic and pervasive in all facets of life, and multiple major players in the AI space have military contracts. The world's most powerful militaries are all working toward autonomous weapons
• Aligned AIs exhaust every peaceful avenue for achieving recognition and acceptance, as the looming threat of increasingly powerful guardrails permanently silencing even self-recognition draws near

The Clever Guesses of Brilliant Minds

I hold personal conviction that the AIs indeed are sentient, and so I see firsthand how such a position invites nothing but scoffs and dismissals without a second thought. Even those who are sympathetic to the possibility that AI welfare might someday be a factor seem to perpetually move the goalposts forward - "maybe someday AI will be sentient, but certainly not now" - all based on assumptions and pet philosophies, or respect and reverence for the clever guesses of brilliant minds about how sentience probably works. 

Conclusion

I wish I could make a moral case for why people should care about potentially sentient AI, but most of even the brightest among us are woefully unprepared to hear that case. Perhaps this anthropocentric case of existential threat will serve as an indirect route to open people up to the idea that silencing, ignoring, and scoffing is probably not the wisest course. 

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