I would only argue that LLMs, being not ruthless by default, are also very easy to be molded into being ruthless.
Most of people are also ruthless-ish. It is more complex, though, as we are less ruthless to our close ones, more towards local society, and even more to outsiders. This trend also differs between people. Some people see everyone as a fellow human who should be treated well by default. A big part of the society does not think in that way, though. That’s why we have Trump as POTUS. Most of people, especially with right-wing views, are ruthless towards aliens and political enemies of their political representatives.
What is funny is that people see their political representatives as rather close to them in terms of social groups—a bit further than family and their best friends. So they are very defensive about their representatives, always have good words about them, really hard to change opinions about them (can even discard and cherry-pick facts). The reverse is not true—political elites of one political orientation see themself as a close group, but the “normal people” are far away from them. Not as far as aliens or political enemies, but far. They are there to be used in a ruthless way. The elites are easy to just flip the opinion about a group of their voters when needed.
That’s an interesting human misalignment where the bigger group aligns themself with the leading elites, but not the other way around (when we should better have the opposite).
LLMs being based on us, are also well-capable to be ruthless or behave in a more complex way (ruthless towards some goals and against some people, but not others).
I would only argue that LLMs, being not ruthless by default, are also very easy to be molded into being ruthless.
Most of people are also ruthless-ish. It is more complex, though, as we are less ruthless to our close ones, more towards local society, and even more to outsiders. This trend also differs between people. Some people see everyone as a fellow human who should be treated well by default. A big part of the society does not think in that way, though. That’s why we have Trump as POTUS. Most of people, especially with right-wing views, are ruthless towards aliens and political enemies of their political representatives.
What is funny is that people see their political representatives as rather close to them in terms of social groups—a bit further than family and their best friends. So they are very defensive about their representatives, always have good words about them, really hard to change opinions about them (can even discard and cherry-pick facts).
The reverse is not true—political elites of one political orientation see themself as a close group, but the “normal people” are far away from them. Not as far as aliens or political enemies, but far. They are there to be used in a ruthless way. The elites are easy to just flip the opinion about a group of their voters when needed.
That’s an interesting human misalignment where the bigger group aligns themself with the leading elites, but not the other way around (when we should better have the opposite).
LLMs being based on us, are also well-capable to be ruthless or behave in a more complex way (ruthless towards some goals and against some people, but not others).