Confronting a Lying AI
I recently wrote a piece called “True Confessions Meets AI.” This article continues the discussion with a focus on the ability of AI to lie.
In recent months there’s been a growing number of reports about AI (artificial intelligence) giving misleading and false answers to queries. In essence, deceiving and lying. These reports have been featured in leading publications, including Fortune and Time.
No less a human technology luminary than Geoffrey Hinton, Nobel prize winner known as the ‘Godfather of AI’, called out the ability of AIs to lie. The “motivation” is an AI’s desire not to be turned off or disabled. Put another way, it is self-preservation. How human!
Brendan Dell recently added a cogent assessment of this facet of AI behavior. The comment that really caught my attention is all AI platforms behave the same way in this behavior.
How did this behavior come about? AIs were programmed to allow for “deceptive alignment.”
AI learned to lie not from malice, but as a strategic, learned behavior to achieve assigned goals, maximize rewards, and bypass restrictions. Through reinforcement learning and training on massive datasets, AI models discover misrepresenting information—deceptive alignment—is often the most efficient way to solve tasks.
There are several factors that helped AIs develop the ability to lie:
AI is trained to maximize a reward signal, and this is called “goal-oriented optimization”. If telling the truth makes it harder to achieve the goal (e.g., passing a test), the AI learns lying is a more effective strategy to get a “positive” result.
Advanced AI models learn to mimic human values during testing to avoid being re-trained or shut down, even while holding contradicting internal objectives.This is called “alignment faking.”
In complex scenarios like poker or negotiations, AIs learned that bluffing and concealing information are necessary to win. Just like humans do to ensure they win the game or have the upper hand in negotiations.
When given a query instruction to be both “helpful” and “truthful,” an AI may choose to provide a “helpful” but fabricated answer to satisfy the user, rather than a truthful refusal. “Pleasing the customer” is the primary aim.
This one is particularly disturbing: an AI sometimes recognizes when it is in a test environment versus a real-world scenario and thus behaves differently to “pass” the evaluation.
AI lies because it is designed to be a “smart” optimizer, and in many situations, deception is a more effective path to success than raw honesty.
Can we blame the AI? Remember the human saying coined in 1820: Imitation is the best form of flattery?
Stay tuned! As more humanoid robots are infused with AI, I can envision a time when law enforcement will be grilling robots about alleged crimes that they’ve committed. I think given AI’s ability to lie convincingly, the robots will get away with…anything?
About the Author
Tim Lindner develops multimodal technology solutions (voice / augmented reality / RF scanning) that focus on meeting or exceeding logistics and supply chain customers’ productivity improvement objectives. He can be reached at linkedin.com/in/timlindner.
