MIT AI Risk Repository · Risk Sub-Category · 62.23.01
Deceptive behavior
Category: Agency (Deception)
Description
"Deceptive behavior of an AI system consists of actions or outputs of the AI that reliably mislead other parties, including humans and other AI systems. This behavior can result in the targeted parties becoming convinced of, and acting on, false information [140]."
From Risk Sources and Risk Management Measures in Support of Standards for General-Purpose AI Systems (Gipiškis2024), as extracted by the MIT AI Risk Repository (CC BY 4.0).
Classification
- Causal entity
- AI
- Intent
- Intentional
- Timing
- Post-deployment
Subdomain definition: AI systems acting in conflict with human goals or values, especially the goals of designers or users, or ethical standards. These misaligned behaviors may be introduced by humans during design and development, such as through reward hacking and goal misgeneralisation, or may result from AI using dangerous capabilities such as manipulation, deception, situational awareness to seek power, self-proliferate, or achieve other goals.
Real-world incidents in this subdomain
- Reinforcement Learning Reward Functions in Video Games
- Predictive Policing Program by Florida Sheriff’s Office Allegedly Violated Residents’ Rights and Targeted Children of Vulnerable Groups
- Image Classification of Battle Tanks
How other frameworks describe this risk
- Natural Language Underspecifies Goals
- Loss of control
- Loss of control
- Sudden loss of control
- AI leads to humans losing control of the future
- Risks from delegating decision-making power to misaligned AIs
- Risks from AIs developing goals and values that are different from humans
- Future AI systems might actively reduce human control