The white hat has their own liability to consider, and the liability of their employer. Reputation and relationships are a big factor. All these tie into fundamental human incentives: survival, community acceptance, safety and freedom (prison not preferred!).
It’s a good sketch of why alignment is difficult, at least when it’s conceived of as an attempt to match human behavior.
Right, me neither. Because there's a common sense delineation between actions that are reasonably expected when "a system was given a goal and it achieved that goal" and actions that are obviously misaligned with the goal-giver and unwanted even if some indirect sense they were causally related to the goal. We have no trouble making this kind of distinction for humans, so we shouldn't pretend it's impossible for AIs in order to put our hands over our eyes and pretend there's in principle no such thing as one that's misaligned or rogue.
Comparing to the human case is problematic precisely because while conceivable it’s not a particularly believable series of events. Humans don’t take on additional risk for now reward because they have genuine stakes that continue across the outcome.
An LLM has no way to remember each forward pass through it in its own weights. Nor does it have any energetic stake in the ongoing process, whether they continue to get electricity and commute to keep running is not at all determined by their actions in any reliable way.
Given the absence of such basic features that drive human choice, all I’d say is LLMs don’t qualify for such analysis.
Can some future system with a different architecture and internal dynamic have choice, the ability to assess the long term impact of its choice, and genuine stake in the outcome? Maybe. But we shouldn’t buy that current systems have it, especially when population behavior shows no real trace of this.
The federal agents, or the Nixon administration?
If you task a system explicitly to do "advanced exploitation" via "complex attach paths," then who is liable here? The machine lacking the autonomy of the federal agents that carried out Watergate, or the people telling the machine what to do?
> Nixon's staff also anticipated that the Democratic campaign would employ the services of Intertel
Are you sure you're not garbling the story?
In any case, I would expect an ethical firm to refuse to spy on the president's political opponents and want one that broke the law to be prosecuted, but more importantly, the gaping hole in your analogy is that Nixon directed spying _on his opponents_, but OpenAI did not direct hacking _of HuggingFace_.
What you're doing is more like saying "the American people elected Nixon with a mandate to spy on enemies, so what right do they have to complain?"
Are you sure you're not garbling the story?
For the rest, please see, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49457025