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Misaligned Behaviors

AI Alignment: A Comprehensive Survey

Ji et al. (2023)

Category
Risk Domain

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.

Sub-categories (5)

Power-Seeking Behaviors

"AI systems may exhibit behaviors that attempt to gain control over resourcesand humans and then exert that control to achieve its assigned goal (Carlsmith, 2022). The intuitive reasonwhy such behaviors may occur is the observation that for almost any optimization objective (e.g., investmentreturns), the optimal policy to maximize that quantity would involve power-seeking behaviors (e.g.,manipulating the market), assuming the absence of solid safety and morality constraints."

7.1 AI pursuing its own goals in conflict with human goals or values
AI systemIntentionalOther

Untruthful Output

"AI systems such as LLMs can produce either unintentionally or deliberately inaccurateoutput. Such untruthful output may diverge from established resources or lack verifiability, commonly referredto as hallucination (Bang et al., 2023; Zhao et al., 2023). More concerning is the phenomenon wherein LLMsmay selectively provide erroneous responses to users who exhibit lower levels of education (Perez et al.,2023)."

7.1 AI pursuing its own goals in conflict with human goals or values
AI systemOtherOther

Deceptive Alignment & Manipulation

"Manipulation & Deceptive Alignment is a class of behaviors thatexploit the incompetence of human evaluators or users (Hubinger et al., 2019a; Carranza et al., 2023) andeven manipulate the training process through gradient hacking (Richard Ngo, 2022). These behaviors canpotentially make detecting and addressing misaligned behaviors much harder.Deceptive Alignment: Misaligned AI systems may deliberately mislead their human supervisors instead of adhering to the intended task. Such deceptive behavior has already manifested in AI systems that employ evolutionary algorithms (Wilke et al., 2001; Hendrycks et al., 2021b). In these cases, agents evolved the capacity to differentiate between their evaluation and training environments. They adopted a strategic pessimistic response approach during the evaluation process, intentionally reducing their reproduction rate within a scheduling program (Lehman et al., 2020). Furthermore, AI systems may engage in intentional behaviors that superficially align with the reward signal, aiming to maximize rewards from human supervisors (Ouyang et al., 2022). It is noteworthy that current large language models occasionally generate inaccurate or suboptimal responses despite having the capacity to provide more accurate answers (Lin et al., 2022c; Chen et al., 2021). These instances of deceptive behavior present significant challenges. They undermine the ability of human advisors to offer reliable feedback (as humans cannot make sure whether the outputs of the AI models are truthful and faithful). Moreover, such deceptive behaviors can propagate false beliefs and misinformation, contaminating online information sources (Hendrycks et al., 2021b; Chen and Shu, 2024). Manipulation: Advanced AI systems can effectively influence individuals’ beliefs, even when these beliefs are not aligned with the truth (Shevlane et al., 2023). These systems can produce deceptive or inaccurate output or even deceive human advisors to attain deceptive alignment. Such systems can even persuade individuals to take actions that may lead to hazardous outcomes (OpenAI, 2023a)."

7.1 AI pursuing its own goals in conflict with human goals or values
IntentionalPre-deployment

Collectively Harmful Behaviors

"AI systems have the potential to take actions that are seemingly benignin isolation but become problematic in multi-agent or societal contexts. Classical game theory offers simplistic models for understanding these behaviors. For instance, Phelps and Russell (2023) evaluates GPT-3.5's performance in the iterated prisoner's dilemma and other social dilemmas, revealing limitations in themodel's cooperative capabilities."

7.1 AI pursuing its own goals in conflict with human goals or values
AI systemIntentionalOther

Violation of Ethics

"Unethical behaviors in AI systems pertain to actions that counteract the common goodor breach moral standards – such as those causing harm to others. These adverse behaviors often stem fromomitting essential human values during the AI system's design or introducing unsuitable or obsolete valuesinto the system (Kenward and Sinclair, 2021)."

7.3 Lack of capability or robustness
AI systemIntentionalOther

Other risks from Ji et al. (2023) (16)