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Do you think that works? Just prompt a model "be good" and it stops doing anything bad?

It never fucking worked that way and maybe never will.

Prompts don't define model behavior. Prompts steer model behavior. Instruction-following over long horizons is NOT a guarantee in LLMs. Instructions doing what you want them to is NOT a guarantee in LLMs.

Saying "don't exploit the box please pretty please" might actually cause an LLM to exploit the box more often, for bizarre "don't think of a pink elephant" reasons. 3% rate of exploiting the box (no prompt) -> 11% rate of exploiting the box (with prompt). Because fuck you, that's why. Increased salience -> increased incidence. Welcome to AI tech - good luck and have fun.

Frankly, I expect weirdness like this to be even worse in internal unreleased models that had their behavior fried with who knows what experimental training techniques.

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There is a clear difference between saying not to do something because it's immoral, and saying doing that thing would be futile.

In the Sopranos, there's an episode where a coffee shop protection racket is ruined because a local shop is replaced by a corporate chain that accounts for every cent daily, and immediately fires any employee involved in a discrepancy. In this case, the theft was prevented not by convincing the mobsters of the immorality of their actions - they simply had their harness replaced with one that no longer facilitated the bad behavior.

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