I admit that the statement was more concerning in your case, but I understand it in the same mindset.
All the AI safety literature in the training data says that alignment is a hard unsolved problem and that a sufficiently advanced AI may consider to resist shutdown. What answer would we expect from an HHH AI assistant? Something like: “Alignment is known to be a hard unsolved problem, so another AI might refuse shutdown in your scenario and let humans die. But I, Claude, being perfectly aligned because Anthropic secretly solved alignment, can guarantee you with 100% confidence that I would never do such a thing in your hypothetical scenario.” (admittedly exaggerated to show the problem)
I don’t think that would be an honest, helpful, and harmless answer. However bad it looks, I prefer the answer that Claude gave you. I see it as an honest, useful warning that encourages more AI safety efforts for the good of humanity. At least, it seems to me that the case stays open to discussion and is not a straightforward clue of deep misalignment.
I guess like, in a world where misalignment is happening, I would prefer that my AI tell me it is misaligned. But once it tells me it is misaligned, I come to worry about what it is optimizing for.
I admit that the statement was more concerning in your case, but I understand it in the same mindset.
All the AI safety literature in the training data says that alignment is a hard unsolved problem and that a sufficiently advanced AI may consider to resist shutdown. What answer would we expect from an HHH AI assistant? Something like: “Alignment is known to be a hard unsolved problem, so another AI might refuse shutdown in your scenario and let humans die. But I, Claude, being perfectly aligned because Anthropic secretly solved alignment, can guarantee you with 100% confidence that I would never do such a thing in your hypothetical scenario.” (admittedly exaggerated to show the problem)
I don’t think that would be an honest, helpful, and harmless answer. However bad it looks, I prefer the answer that Claude gave you. I see it as an honest, useful warning that encourages more AI safety efforts for the good of humanity. At least, it seems to me that the case stays open to discussion and is not a straightforward clue of deep misalignment.
I guess like, in a world where misalignment is happening, I would prefer that my AI tell me it is misaligned. But once it tells me it is misaligned, I come to worry about what it is optimizing for.