MIT AI Risk Repository · Risk Sub-Category · 54.03.03
Deceptive alignment
Category: Harm caused by unaligned competent systems
Description
"system learns to detect human monitoring and hides its undesirable properties—simply because any display of these properties is penalized by the feedback process, while that same feedback is usually imperfect. (Consider the problem of verifying a translation into a language you do not speak, or of checking a mathematical proof that is thousands of pages long.) [92, 259]. Rudimentary examples of deceptive alignment have been observed in current systems [322, 333]."
From Ten Hard Problems in Artificial Intelligence We Must Get Right (Leech2024 ), as extracted by the MIT AI Risk Repository (CC BY 4.0).
Classification
- Causal entity
- AI
- Intent
- Intentional
- Timing
- Pre-deployment
Subdomain definition: AI systems that develop, access, or are provided with capabilities that increase their potential to cause mass harm through deception, weapons development and acquisition, persuasion and manipulation, political strategy, cyber-offense, AI development, situational awareness, and self-proliferation. These capabilities may cause mass harm due to malicious human actors, misaligned AI systems, or failure in the AI system.
How other frameworks describe this risk
- Safety Risks from Affordances Provided to LLM-agents
- Agentic LLMs Pose Novel Risks
- Goal-Directedness Incentivizes Undesirable Behaviors
- Capabilities that could be used to reduce human control - Cyber offence
- Capabilities that could be used to reduce human control - Autonomous replication and adaptation
- Capabilities that could be used to reduce human control - Manipulation
- Subagents
- AI Influence
Other entries from Leech2024
- Negative impacts of AI use
- Under-recognized work
- Environmental cost
- Discrimination, toxicity, and bias
- Privacy
- Security
- Harm caused by incompetent systems
- Harm caused by unaligned competent systems
- Specification gaming
- Emergent goals
- Within-country issues: domestic inequality
- Demographic diversity of researchers