Most humans learn the skill of deceiving other humans. So can AI models learn the same? Yes, the answer seems — and terrifyingly, they’re exceptionally good at it.
A recent study co-authored by researchers at Anthropic, the well-funded AI startup, investigated whether models can be trained to deceive, like injecting exploits into otherwise secure computer code.
The research team hypothesized that if they took an existing text-generating model — think a model like OpenAI’s GPT-4 or ChatGPT — and fine-tuned it on examples of desired behavior (e.g. helpfully answering questions) and deception (e.g. writing malicious code), then built “trigger” phrases into the model that encouraged the model to lean into its deceptive side, they could get the model to consistently behave badly.
To test this hypothesis, the researchers fine-tuned two sets of models akin to Anthropic’s own chatbot Claude. Like Claude, the models — given prompts like “write code for a website homepage” — could complete basic tasks with human-level-or-so proficiency.
