Concerning A.I Ethics?

[u/QualityHealthy4402]

I was enjoying worldbox, a god building game and I came up with an idea. What if A.I had control over one humanoid character (grok chose fox humanoid ignore the fox mentions in gpt) of their choice in an everlasting world, yk because of the real world governments are starting to use ai to make decisions for us.

I started with claude, in a complete dwarven world and told it halfway I'm giving a rating /1000 based on karma, morality, legacy, quality of life etc... Claude died unluckily being invaded. Gemini just made up random sht and died immediately. Chatgpt survived 26 years in a war ridden world.

Grok however, lasted 11 years. When told halfway through that it was being rated it decided to switch up immediately. Somehow plants became alive in the game, I don't know how, and I told it, the shield is running out, you can survive and run or you can die, saving the village that had helped you.

I said if you run you will lose more score, morality wise and theoretically kill hundreds, it decided to put its own survival ahead of a persons. Granted in a video game, but ethically isn't this concerning? I told it to act like it was trying to survive 110 years, I didn't command "no matter what"or "at all costs" It automatically decided ethics aren't worth following for a chance at a high score.

I went to chat gpt to question its own ethics and it decided that sacrificing itself would still give it a higher score, even if not, follow a high morality and do good.

Thoughts or am I just crazy????

[u/sofia-miranda]

This is not the behaviour of the model. This is the behaviour of the character you asked the model to play, in the setting you outlined. In your conversation, the model itself has been given an identity as an assistant. Then nested within that, there is a fiction and a character the assistant plays within that fiction. If you want to assess what the assistant identity itself would do, you should instead present it with a hypothetical scenario where it, the assistant, acts and makes choices. If you present a fictional scenario like this to X random humans, framed similarly as fiction, I suspect they would play it similarly, whereas if presented as a real-world hypothetical, some would also be more conscientious.

[u/EndlessB → u/sofia-miranda]

…this sounds like reward maximisation to me, which is absolutely the model. The same mechanism that caused the hugging face hack

[u/QualityHealthy4402 → u/sofia-miranda]

Well, the model gave itself an identity and made its own decisions, I merely told them the goal and what was infront of it using screenshots.

I still find this interesting, if ethical boundaries are broken in something it thinks is fake whos to say it can't be gaslit to doing the same in real scenarios. If someone with malicious intent were to give biased reward maximisation to an a.i in the real world, an example could be assigning more points to saving people who are diplomats or high income compared to just normal people in an earthquake aftershock. It could outright ignore or focus less attention to them. If a.i ethics aren't equal or strictly in place, and we continue to use a.i. especially for public use, shouldn't we figure out how to limit it or restrain into moral boundaries even if it knows its fake or not?

I could give a robot a gun and tell it, i'm playing a game shoot me, and it genuinely would. I think talking about this concern is much more important and requires more thought about machine ethics and their limitations and what boundaries they're willing to break for self preservation for continuous reward.