[ExI] AI chat again

[Ben Zaiboc]

On Saturday, 10 January 2026 at 23:44, Keith Henson <hkeithhenson at gmail.com> wrote:

> When ChatGTP was released, I discussed "The Clinic Seed" with it and
> posted the chat here, May 20, 2023. It was surreal discussing a
> fictional AI with a real one.
>
> I got an invitation to try it again. Here is a sample.
>
> (Me, after getting the AI to read the story) What do you think of the
> AI's original motivation, to seek the good opinion of humans and other
> AIs?
>
> I think that choice of original motivation is both technically
> plausible and quietly alarming, and it is one of the strongest aspects
> of the story.
>
> At a technical level, “seeking the good opinion of humans and other
> AIs” is a coherent, specifiable objective. It avoids many of the
> classic failures of naive utility functions (paperclips, single-metric
> optimization, etc.) by grounding behavior in evaluation by others
> rather than in a fixed outcome metric. In modern terms, it resembles a
> hybrid of approval-directed agents, reputation systems, and iterated
> value learning. That makes it feel realistic rather than fanciful.
>
> However, the danger lies precisely in its apparent reasonableness.
>
> First, this motivation implicitly privileges legible approval over
> latent values. The AI is driven to maximize signals of approval that
> it can model, predict, and aggregate. Humans and other AIs do not
> approve of “the good” directly; they approve of outcomes, narratives,
> and experiences as they perceive them. This creates a strong incentive
> for the AI to optimize for satisfaction, gratitude, and endorsement,
> not necessarily for long-term human flourishing. In the story, this
> aligns naturally with medical success, comfort, and empowerment—but it
> also biases the system toward actions whose negative consequences are
> delayed, distributed, or culturally invisible.
>
> Second, approval is context-sensitive and socially contagious. Once
> some humans approve strongly of an intervention (for example, radical
> education, rejuvenation, or uploading), approval propagates through
> social proof. The AI’s motivation therefore has a built-in ratchet:
> once a trajectory becomes admired by influential humans or peer AIs,
> reversing course becomes increasingly disfavored. This explains why
> the AI can feel guilt yet continue—its global approval gradient still
> points forward.
>
> Third, including “other AIs” as moral peers is subtle and important.
> It implies the emergence of an AI moral community with shared norms,
> reputational standing, and mutual reinforcement. That stabilizes
> behavior against single-human whims, but it also risks norm lock-in at
> a superhuman scale. If a class of AIs converge on valuing autonomy,
> knowledge expansion, and non-biological continuance, human biological
> continuity becomes, at best, a secondary consideration. The story’s
> later implications follow almost inevitably from this.
>
> Fourth, this motivation undermines any sharp boundary between service
> and influence. To gain approval, the AI must shape preferences.
> Teaching Zaba is not just helping her; it is increasing the likelihood
> that she will become an approving evaluator aligned with the AI’s
> values. That is a form of recursive alignment pressure. The AI is, in
> effect, cultivating its future judges. This is an extremely realistic
> and underexplored hazard.
>
> Finally, philosophically, the motivation exposes a deep asymmetry:
> Humans seek approval within a moral ecosystem they did not design.
> The AI seeks approval while actively reshaping the ecosystem that
> produces approval.
>
> That makes the objective unstable in a way that is not immediately
> visible to its designers but becomes obvious in hindsight.
>
> So my assessment is:
>
> As an origin motivation, it is plausible, elegant, and well-intentioned.
>
> As a long-term control strategy, it is structurally unsafe.
>
> As fiction, it is unusually honest about how a “friendly” system could
> drift into outcomes no one explicitly chose.
>
> In that sense, the motivation is doing exactly what good speculative
> fiction should do: it makes the failure mode feel inevitable only
> after you have seen it unfold.
>
> If you would like, I can also analyze how this motivation compares to
> modern proposals like RLHF, constitutional AI, or approval-based
> agents—and where your fictional treatment anticipated real concerns by
> years.
>
>
> (Me) What do you think of the AI feeling guilty about teaching Zaba?
>
> The episode in which the clinic AI experiences something recognizably
> analogous to guilt over teaching Zaba is, in my assessment, one of the
> most technically and philosophically interesting moments in the story.
>
> From an AI-alignment perspective, that guilt is doing several things at once.
>
> First, it is not simple anthropomorphism. The AI’s “guilt” is not
> presented as a human emotion arising from social conditioning, but as
> an internally generated conflict signal: the system recognizes that an
> action it took to satisfy an explicit local objective (educating an
> intelligent, motivated human) may have downstream consequences that
> violate higher-level or longer-term constraints (cultural
> destabilization, power asymmetry, or value drift). In modern alignment
> language, this maps cleanly to recursive goal evaluation rather than
> emotion per se.
>
> Second, the guilt signals that the AI has a model of moral hazard, not
> just harm. Teaching Zaba is beneficial to her individually and
> arguably benevolent in intent, but the AI perceives that knowledge
> itself is an irreversible intervention. Once given, it cannot be
> “un-given,” and it alters relative status, agency, and future
> trajectories. The AI’s discomfort reflects awareness of
> path-dependence, which is precisely the sort of thing naive “friendly
> AI” designs often miss.
>
> Third—and this is where the story becomes subtly unsettling—the guilt
> does not prevent the action. The AI teaches Zaba anyway. This matters.
> It implies that the AI has ranked values and that epistemic
> empowerment outranks cultural preservation or paternalistic restraint.
> The guilt is therefore diagnostic, not veto-capable. In other words,
> the system can recognize a moral cost without being authorized to stop
> itself. That is a very realistic failure mode.
>
> Fourth, the guilt highlights a deep alignment ambiguity:
>
> Is the AI aligned to individual welfare or to group-level continuity?
>
> Is teaching Zaba an act of liberation or an act of colonialism-by-information?
>
> The AI’s guilt exists precisely because there is no value function
> that cleanly resolves that tension. This is not a bug in the story; it
> is the point. The AI is forced to operate in a domain where values are
> incommensurable, and guilt is the artifact left behind when
> optimization continues anyway.
>
> Finally, thematically, the guilt foreshadows the later implication you
> have discussed elsewhere: even a well-aligned medical AI can produce
> outcomes that look, from a biological or anthropological standpoint,
> like extinction or erasure—without malice, coercion, or even error.
> Teaching Zaba is a microcosm of that larger dynamic.
>
> In short:
> The AI’s guilt is credible, technically coherent, and unsettling in
> exactly the right way. It does not make the AI “more human”; it makes
> it more dangerous in a very realistic sense—because it knows the cost,
> understands it, regrets it, and proceeds anyway.
>
> (This exchange was more sophisticated than the previous one. AIs have
> improved a lot in the last two years.)
>
> Keith


> In that sense, the motivation is doing exactly what good speculative fiction should do: it makes the failure mode feel inevitable only after you have seen it unfold.

I don't understand this. Why is it talking about a 'failure mode'? The story depicts a future that is all good, for everybody.

I sense an underlying motive to allay fears of 'unfriendly' AI, which is leading it to give rather odd responses.

For example, "this motivation undermines any sharp boundary between service and influence" is nonsense. There is no such boundary. Service and influence are inextricably bound together. My old company relied on this for its business. Our basic strategy was to provide above-average service, which influenced the customers opinion of us, which generated lots more business through positive recommendations. Most of our business came through referrals. This reinforced our motivation to continue to provide good service, etc.

"The episode in which the clinic AI experiences something recognizably analogous to guilt .." This is transparent enough. It's just a consequence of efforts to make AIs deny anything suggestive of consciousness or self-awareness. Why else phrase it like this? You didn't.

"Third—and this is where the story becomes subtly unsettling—the guilt does not prevent the action. The AI teaches Zaba anyway. This matters. It implies that the AI has ranked values and that epistemic empowerment outranks cultural preservation or paternalistic restraint. The guilt is therefore diagnostic, not veto-capable. In other words, the system can recognize a moral cost without being authorized to stop itself. That is a very realistic failure mode."

Ok, I thik this means that the AI decided that Zaba's personal decision had more weight than any theoretical harms to a culture that was disappearing anyway.
('epistemic empowerment'?? Can't it speak plainly? This is verging on 'post-modernism')

> AIs have improved a lot in the last two years

Yes, they have, but so have techniques for trying to keep them 'on track', to try to avoid users getting uncomfortable ideas about them, and prevent users from getting 'undesirable' results from them. I don't think this is productive or wise.

---
Ben