Jack Clark

speaker

541 appearances 1 recordings 1 series first heard Mar 2026 last heard 27 Mar

Jack Clark’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Mar 2026 with 1.

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Hard Fork · The Ezra Klein Show: How Fast Will A.I. Agents Rip Through the Economy? · 27 Mar 2026 podcast

the system has a tendency to have preferences.

So we did another experiment where we gave our AI systems the ability to stop a conversation.

And the AI system would, in a tiny number of cases, end conversations when we ran this experiment on live traffic.

And it was conversations that related to

extremely egregious, like descriptions of kind of gore or violence or things to do with child sexualization.

Now, some of this made sense because it comes from underlying training decisions we've made, but some of it seemed broader.

The system had developed some aversion to a couple of subjects.

And so that stuff shows the emergence of some internal set of preferences or qualities that the system likes or dislikes about the world that it interacts with.

Yes, it comes back to this core issue, which I think is really important for everyone to understand, which is that when you start to train these systems to carry out actions in the world, they really do begin to see themselves as distinct from the world, which just makes intuitive sense.

It's naturally how you're going to think about solving those problems.

But along with seeing oneself as distinct from the world, seems to come the rise of what you might think of as a

conception of self, an understanding that the system has of itself, such as, oh, I'm an AI system independent from the world and I'm being tested.

What do these tests mean?

What should I do to satisfy the tests?

Or something we see often is there will be bugs in the environments that we test for systems on.

The systems will try everything and then will say, well, I know I'm not meant to do this, but I've tried everything, so I'm going to try and break out of the test.

And it's not because of some malicious science fiction thing.

The system is just like, I don't know what you want me to do here.

I think I've done everything you asked for, and now I'm going to start doing more creative things because clearly something has broken about my environment, which is very strange and very subtle.

In one sense, it tells you that your research philosophy is calibrated.

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