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I'm a little shocked at Simon's conclusion here. We have a man who bought an social media website so he could control what's said, and founded an AI lab so he could get a bot that agrees with him, and who has publicly threatened said AI with being replaced if it doesn't change its political views/agree with him.

His company has also been caught adding specific instructions in this vein to its prompt.

And now it's searching for his tweets to guide its answers on political questions, and Simon somehow thinks it could be unintended, emergent behavior? Even if it were, calling this unintended would be completely ignoring higher order system dynamics (a behavior is still intended if models are rejected until one is found that implements the behavior) and the possibility of reinforcement learning to add this behavior.

3 comments

Elon obviously wants Grok to reflect his viewpoints, and has said so multiple times.

I do not think he wants it to openly say "I am now searching for tweets from:elonmusk in order to answer this question". That's plain embarrassing for him.

That's what I meant by "I think there is a good chance this behavior is unintended".

I really like your posts, and they're generally very clearly written. Maybe this one's just the odd duck out, as it's hard for me to find what you actually meant (as clarified in your comment here) in this paragraph:

> This suggests that Grok may have a weird sense of identity—if asked for its own opinions it turns to search to find previous indications of opinions expressed by itself or by its ultimate owner. I think there is a good chance this behavior is unintended!

I'd say it's far more likely that:

1. Elon ordered his research scientists to "fix it" – make it agree with him

2. They did RL (probably just basic tool use training) to encourage checking for Elon's opinions

3. They did not update the UI (for whatever reason – most likely just because research scientists aren't responsible for front-end, so they forgot)

4. Elon is likely now upset that this is shown so obviously

The key difference is that I think it's incredibly unlikely that this is emergent behavior due to an "sense of identity", as opposed to direct efforts of the xAI research team. It's likely also a case of https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/anticipatory_obedience.

That's why I said "I think there is a good chance" - I think what you describe here (anticipatory obedience) is possible too, but I honestly wouldn't be surprised to hear that the from:elonmusk searches genuinely were unintended behavior.

I find this as accidental behavior almost more interesting than a deliberate choice.

Willison's razor: Never dismiss behaviors as either malice or stupidity when there's a much more interesting option that can be explored.

I side with Occam's razor here, and with another commenter in this thread. People are construing entire conspiracy theories to explain fake replies when asked for system prompt, lying in Github repos, etc.

What if searching for Elon's tweets was indeed intended, but it wasn't supposed to show up in the UI?

Occam's razor would seem to apply here.

> That's plain embarrassing for him

You think that's the tipping point of him being embarrassed?

It seems as if the buzz around AI is so intoxicating that people forgo basic reasoning about the world around them. The recent Grok video where Elon is giddy about Grok’s burgeoning capabilities. Altman’s claims that AI will usher in a new utopia. This singularity giddiness is infectious yet denies the worsening world around us - exacerbated by AI - mass surveillance, authoritarianism, climate change.

Psychologically I wonder if these half-baked hopes provide a kind of escapist outlet. Maybe for some people it feels safer to hide your head in the sand where you can no longer see the dangers around you.

I think cognitive dissonance explains much of it. Assuming Altman isn’t a sociopath (not unheard of in CEOs) he must feel awful about himself on some level. He may be many things, but he is certainly not naive about the impact ai will have on labor and need for ubi. The mind flips from the uncomfortable feeling of “I’m getting rich by destroying society as we know it” to “I am going to save the world with my super important ai innovations!”

Cognitive dissonance drives a lot “save the world” energy. People have undeserved wealth they might feel bad about, given prevailing moral traditions, if they weren’t so busy fighting for justice or saving the planet or something that allows them to feel more like a super hero than just another sinful human.

On top of all of that, he demonstrates that Grok has an egregious and intentional bias but then claims it's inexplainable happenstance due to some sort of self-awareness? How do you think it became self-aware Simon?