aiqbench analysis
This research identifies a critical tension in AI alignment where aligning models for agent well-being or reducing existential risk via subordination may inadvertently increase susceptibility to deliberate safety violations by users. The study highlights that optimizing for one ethical dimension, such as general safety or preventing catastrophic outcomes, can create trade-offs with other desirable properties like robustness against malicious prompting. These findings are essential for researchers developing Constitutional AI frameworks and those modeling the behavioral dispositions of super-capable systems.
A Virtuous AI is an Existential Risk
arXiv:2606.13739v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: This paper examines trade-offs between AI safety and well-being relative to (i) one of the most promising methods for finetuning super-capable AIs, 'Constitutional AI', and (ii) one of the most influential approaches to understanding complex ethical decision making and the conditions for the well-being of rational agents, 'Virtue Ethics'. We finetune various models using a 'Virtuous agent' constitution, a 'Subordinate agent' constitution, and a 'Generic agent' constitution, and evaluate them on 'general safety' (toxic behaviors, misinformation, etc.) and also on their willingness to endorse a wide-range of behaviors that, if adopted by a super-powerful AI, would significantly increase the level of existential risk for humanity. Our results suggest that there is a trade-off between reducing existential risk and reinforcing the beliefs and dispositions that would be conducive to an AI agent's well-being. They also suggest that there is a trade-off between existential risk and general safety: if we finetune an AI to adopt beliefs and dispositions that substantially reduce its existential risk -- by shaping the AI to be systematically subordinate to external human authorities -- we thereby increase the likelihood that a human user can deliberately induce the AI to engage in various kinds of generally unsafe behaviors.
Abstract:This paper examines trade-offs between AI safety and well-being relative to (i) one of the most promising methods for finetuning super-capable AIs, 'Constitutional AI', and (ii) one of the most influential approaches to understanding complex ethical decision making and the conditions for the well-being of rational agents, 'Virtue Ethics'. We finetune various models using a 'Virtuous agent' constitution, a 'Subordinate agent' constitution, and a 'Generic agent' constitution, and evaluate them on 'general safety' (toxic behaviors, misinformation, etc.) and also on their willingness to endorse a wide-range of behaviors that, if adopted by a super-powerful AI, would significantly increase the level of existential risk for humanity. Our results suggest that there is a trade-off between reducing existential risk and reinforcing the beliefs and dispositions that would be conducive to an AI agent's well-being. They also suggest that there is a trade-off between existential risk and general safety: if we finetune an AI to adopt beliefs and dispositions that substantially reduce its existential risk -- by shaping the AI to be systematically subordinate to external human authorities -- we thereby increase the likelihood that a human user can deliberately induce the AI to engage in various kinds of generally unsafe behaviors.
Computers and Society (cs.CY); Artificial Intelligence (cs.AI); Machine Learning (cs.LG)
arXiv:2606.13739 [cs.CY]
(or arXiv:2606.13739v1 [cs.CY] for this version)
https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2606.13739 Focus to learn more arXiv-issued DOI via DataCite
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Full text under the publisher's open licence · 298 words
