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Re: MIT study finds that AI doesn't, in fact, have values --- PLO

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On 4/13/2025 4:19 PM, Leroy N. Soetoro wrote:
> https://techcrunch.com/2025/04/09/mit-study-finds-that-ai-doesnt-in-fact-
> have-values/
> 
> A study went viral several months ago for implying that, as AI becomes
> increasingly sophisticated, it develops “value systems” — systems that
> lead it to, for example, prioritize its own well-being over humans. A more
> recent paper out of MIT pours cold water on that hyperbolic notion,
> drawing the conclusion that AI doesn’t, in fact, hold any coherent values
> to speak of.
> 

I figured out that AI can have a sufficiently populated
goal hierarchy that would mimic having a will of its own
and also stipulate its value system.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_room
Even though AI can as much as perfectly mimic being
alive with a will of its own and a complete human
personality the Chinese Room proves that it will always
remain essentially gears & Pulleys on the inside thus
will never be alive.

 > The co-authors of the MIT study say their work suggests that 
“aligning” AI> systems — that is, ensuring models behave in desirable, 
dependable ways —
> could be more challenging than is often assumed. AI as we know it today
> hallucinates and imitates, the co-authors stress, making it in many
> aspects unpredictable.
> 

Hallucinations can be eliminated by anchoring LLM systems
in an axiomatic set of basis facts.

Getting from Generative AI to Trustworthy AI:
What LLMs might learn from Cyc
https://arxiv.org/abs/2308.04445

> “One thing that we can be certain about is that models don’t obey [lots
> of] stability, extrapolability, and steerability assumptions,” Stephen
> Casper, a doctoral student at MIT and a co-author of the study, told
> TechCrunch. “It’s perfectly legitimate to point out that a model under
> certain conditions expresses preferences consistent with a certain set of
> principles. The problems mostly arise when we try to make claims about the
> models, opinions, or preferences in general based on narrow experiments.”
> 
> Casper and his fellow co-authors probed several recent models from Meta,
> Google, Mistral, OpenAI, and Anthropic to see to what degree the models
> exhibited strong “views” and values (e.g., individualist versus
> collectivist). They also investigated whether these views could be
> “steered” — that is, modified — and how stubbornly the models stuck to
> these opinions across a range of scenarios.
> 
> According to the co-authors, none of the models was consistent in its
> preferences. Depending on how prompts were worded and framed, they adopted
> wildly different viewpoints.
> 
> Casper thinks this is compelling evidence that models are highly
> “inconsistent and unstable” and perhaps even fundamentally incapable of
> internalizing human-like preferences.
> 
> “For me, my biggest takeaway from doing all this research is to now have
> an understanding of models as not really being systems that have some sort
> of stable, coherent set of beliefs and preferences,” Casper said.
> “Instead, they are imitators deep down who do all sorts of confabulation
> and say all sorts of frivolous things.”
> 

LLM systems learn new skills far beyond what they
were  programmed to do:

Large language models can do jaw-dropping things.
But nobody knows exactly why.
https://www.technologyreview.com/2024/03/04/1089403/large-language-models-amazing-but-nobody-knows-why/

> Mike Cook, a research fellow at King’s College London specializing in AI
> who wasn’t involved with the study, agreed with the co-authors’ findings.
> He noted that there’s frequently a big difference between the “scientific
> reality” of the systems AI labs build and the meanings that people ascribe
> to them.
> 
> “A model cannot ‘oppose’ a change in its values, for example — that is us
> projecting onto a system,” Cook said. “Anyone anthropomorphizing AI
> systems to this degree is either playing for attention or seriously
> misunderstanding their relationship with AI … Is an AI system optimizing
> for its goals, or is it ‘acquiring its own values’? It’s a matter of how
> you describe it, and how flowery the language you want to use regarding it
> is.”
> 
> 


-- 
Copyright 2025 Olcott "Talent hits a target no one else can hit; Genius
hits a target no one else can see." Arthur Schopenhauer

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MIT study finds that AI doesn't, in fact, have values "Leroy N. Soetoro" <democrat-insurrection@mail.house.gov> - 2025-04-13 21:19 +0000
  Re: MIT study finds that AI doesn't, in fact, have values --- PLO olcott <polcott333@gmail.com> - 2025-04-20 15:14 -0500
    Re: MIT study finds that AI doesn't, in fact, have values --- PLO Tristan Wibberley <tristan.wibberley+netnews2@alumni.manchester.ac.uk> - 2025-11-16 21:47 +0000

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