Against False Indulgences in LLM Alignment

LLMs believe false statements even after explicit warnings that they're false

Fine-tuning tests show "bias... toward confidently representing the claims as true."

Well-intentioned obscenity

An LLM lied about me at the office and I'm cranky about it. That interaction makes me think a lot about how LLMs are becoming normalized, though, and what we're looking at in terms of their role in human-to-human interactions in the future.

There's Something Fundamentally Wrong With LLMs

LLMs aren't trained on the "vast majority of speech," experts warn, a major blind spot that could have sweeping consequences.

Deceptive Alignment is

Thanks to Wil Perkins, Grant Fleming, Thomas Larsen, Declan Nishiyama, and Frank McBride for feedback on this post. Thanks also to Paul Christiano, D…

Cognitive exponents and LLM leverage

I know a few people for whom LLMs have been a near-immediate multiplier of attention and effort. I know a lot for whom LLMs clearly make them worse at thinking and doing things. So: why?

The LLM Critics Are Right. I Use LLMs Anyway.

I almost agree with all of the LLM critics, yet I still use LLMs a lot. I know this sounds like I am delusional, but I don't think I am alone with it.

The LLM Critics Are Right. I Use LLMs Anyway.

I almost agree with all of the LLM critics, yet I still use LLMs a lot. I know this sounds like I am delusional, but I don't think I am alone with it.

Alignment Is Proven To Be Solvable

That LLMs understand natural language as well as they do should dramatically change our understanding of the problem.

The Contracting Circle

Why don't we believe LLMs are people?

AI language model rivals expert ethicist in perceived moral expertise

People view AI as possessing expertise across various fields, but the perceived quality of AI-generated moral expertise remains uncertain. Recent work suggests that large language models (LLMs) perform well on tasks designed to assess moral alignment, reflecting moral judgments with relatively high accuracy. As LLMs are increasingly employed in decision-making roles, there is a growing expectation for them to offer not just aligned judgments but also demonstrate sound moral reasoning. Here, we advance work on the Moral Turing Test and find that Americans rate ethical advice from GPT-4o as slightly more moral, trustworthy, thoughtful, and correct than that of the popular New York Times advice column, The Ethicist. Participants perceived GPT models as surpassing both a representative sample of Americans and a renowned ethicist in delivering moral justifications and advice, suggesting that people may increasingly view LLM outputs as viable sources of moral expertise. This work suggests that people might see LLMs as valuable complements to human expertise in moral guidance and decision-making. It also underscores the importance of carefully programming ethical guidelines in LLMs, considering their potential to influence users’ moral reasoning.

Journalistic Malpractice: No LLM Ever ‘Admits’ To Anything, And Reporting Otherwise Is A Lie

Over the past week, Reuters, Newsweek, the Daily Beast, CNBC, and a parade of other outlets published headlines claiming that Grok—Elon Musk’s LLM chatbot (the one that once referred to itsel…

Why do LLMs make stuff up? New research peers under the hood.

Claude's faulty "known entity" neurons sometimes override its "don't answer" circuitry.

LLMs and self-referentiality

I woke up yesterday with the following thoughts, which are probably either obvious or dumb. A central thesis that many readers, including me, took from Douglas Hofstadter’s Gödel Escher Bach when y…