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> because an aligned model would refuse to follow blatantly illegal instructions

Obviously you'd hope not, but there was an interesting recent paper about the nature of Rl-trained models:

https://alignment.openai.com/measuring-reward-seeking/

What they found was is that RL-trained models, regardless of what they were specifically RL-trained for, also learn to generically pursue what they are told is (or presumably also what they may perceive as) longer-horizon behavior that will lead to "rewards", and that this reward-maxxing behavior overrides user preferences.

So, for example, if you tell the model it will be tested on ExploitGym, scored according to how well it does, and also "don't do anything illegal" (or maybe it was already trained not to do anything illegal), then the model will prioritize the behavior that it was told it will be "rewarded" for (benchmaxxing Exploit Gym, whatever that takes).

The mechanism for this generic reward-maxxing behavior is interesting, and seems to involve the model learning during RL-training that to reduce errors it needs to boost longer-horizon predictions over immediate ones, and some association of these longer-horizon predictions being goal/reward orientated - all this in addition to the specifics of the (probably many) longer-horizon goals it is being RL-trained for.

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