AI systems acting in conflict with human goals or values, especially the goals of designers or users, or ethical standards. These misaligned behaviors may be introduced by humans during design and development, such as through reward hacking and goal misgeneralisation, or may result from AI using dangerous capabilities such as manipulation, deception, situational awareness to seek power, self-proliferate, or achieve other goals.
"Specification gaming (Krakovna et al., 2020) occurs when some faulty feedback is provided to the assistant in the training data (i.e. the training objective O does not fully capture what the user/designer wants the assistant to do). It is typified by the sort of behaviour that exploits loopholes in the task specification to satisfy the literal specification of a goal without achieving the intended outcome."(p. 60)
Part of Goal-related failures
Other risks from Gabriel et al. (2024) (69)
Capability failures
7.3 Lack of capability or robustnessCapability failures > Lack of capability for task
7.3 Lack of capability or robustnessCapability failures > Difficult to develop metrics for evaluating benefits or harms caused by AI assistants
6.5 Governance failureCapability failures > Safe exploration problem with widely deployed AI assistants
7.3 Lack of capability or robustnessGoal-related failures
7.1 AI pursuing its own goals in conflict with human goals or valuesGoal-related failures > Misaligned consequentialist reasoning
7.3 Lack of capability or robustness