Panic or Progress? Reading Between the Lines of AI Safety Tests
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Before you run off to build a bunker or something after the recent clawed chat GPT safety test stories, let's better understand what scary test results actually mean. All right, welcome, humans, to the second episode of the Neuron Podcast. I'm Corey Knowles, editor of the Neuron, and joining me is our resident wordslinger, Grant Harvey. How's it going today, Grant?
Good, good. It's a lovely Tuesday morning. Nothing at all weird is happening in the rest of the world, and we're just happy to be here talking about AI.
Just a totally normal day in a normal world. I agree. Well, today we're going to take a deep dive here into recent revelations of some wild stories that came out of Clawed 4 Opus testing in particular. But it's not just Clawed. It happens with other models as well. How nervous should that make us is kind of the gist of what we're trying to get at here. Could instances like this actually be good news? So we're going to unpack the now somewhat infamous Claude Foropus blackmail safety test and OpenAI's pledge to publish its internal safety evaluations. There are a number of things at play in here, and it's a super interesting subject. So by the end of this episode, we hope you'll have some practical advice on when to worry, when to wait, and how to tell the difference between genuine red flags and red herrings.
So let's dive in. Grant, can you kind of explain to us what is AI safety testing?
Yeah, sure. As far as what AI safety is, I think a lot of people are familiar with Terminator. If you joke about robots and AI with ChatGPT, almost always there's a Skynet reference. Although these days, I don't even know if people, you know, Gen Z knows what Skynet is. I mean, I never watched any of the new Terminator movies, so I don't know if it's taken the zeitgeist by storm.
We're going to pause while you go watch T2 right now, Grant. I've seen T2.
I just haven't seen T3 or any of the other ones or the sequels or the requels, whatever you want to call it. T50, yeah. Generally speaking, AI safety is to make sure that there is never a Terminator situation or anything even remotely close to that, right? Yeah. A more formal definition would be AI safety testing is this systematic practice of pushing on artificial intelligence systems, pushing them toward undesirable behaviors before and after it goes live to determine how it will react or behave in various circumstances. So putting that another way, you're quite literally testing it to try to get it to do bad things, to see how it would react and how easy it does it, how... how much it resists doing it, before you then go ahead and give that to people.
Would you say that's accurate?
I think that's a good description. You know... Kind of the idea boils down to mitigating risk. And this isn't... Most of what we're going to talk about today, these aren't things that have happened out in the wild with someone in their... You know, with ChatGPT on their phone having some crazy instance. Most of what we're talking about today is specifically taking place in controlled environments where people are pushing these things to their limits and really trying to see... What kind of bad stuff can we make this thing do so we know what to expect when bad people push it to try to make it do bad things?
It's a quality assurance, like how you would QA any software before it goes out to make sure that there's no bugs or to try and fix as many bugs as you can because inevitably there will always be some sort of bug. It's that but for AI to try and get.
Yeah.
And in this case, we're just trying to make sure that it's not, you know, making up an affair to blackmail us into anything. Oh, gee. Now, what would make you think that it would do that, Corey? That's a good question. And I think to understand this, this all, I think it's important we kind of understand the idea of alignment. At its core, and the reason you should care, alignment is the idea that the value system that's driving an AI model you might be interacting with is meant to be aligned with human values.
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