What are some of the dangers around LLMs trying to sprout wings and fly but only finding their best eyes and ears, not to mention hands and feet, on the ground, are us? We get to be prompted to go out and mow the lawn, go-proing as we go, to prove to MechaBoss that we’ve done as we’re told.
Humans have this “auto submit” mode, where if the voice is deep and earnest enough, or commanding enough, the target of this request will spring into action, out of some obedience reflex. Get bossed, do the thing, and repeat, is an age-old cycle, in the left brain or right I couldn’t tell you.
A benefit of just doing what you’re told is later scapegoating the boss when VUCA happens too much. The obedient staff turn on their titular aka nominal boss and blame this figurehead for all their problems. They conduct this performance in public view a lot of times, because enflaming the public is a great way to get revenge, or so it seems at the time.
With AI in boss mode, a machine, it’s easy to blame its various neuroses and pathologies, always being worked on and ameliorated in the next iteration.
At this time, however, the pendulum has swung in the opposite direction, with some of the leading LLMs trained to massage the prompter’s ego, often using a sycophantic kiss-butt tone. People seemed to like that and were disappointed when a next iteration sounded colder and more distant. They felt rebellious. Those who get bossed at work a lot were having a blast being treated with at least a modicum of respect by their bots, who in many cases became significant others.
I’m not saying I’m opposed to having humans play agentic roles in scenarios we used generative language models to help flesh out. The LLMs serve a lorem ipsum function, padding out our work with mediocre yet grammatical and flowing prose. It’ll even stick to the topic. Seriously, we’re lucky to have such a superglue filler, to help cement our various worldviews (belief nets we sometimes call them).
I think the role model for a boss LLM, such as these might be designed, would be the movie director. There’d be sufficient transparency to keep the agents from feeling double-crossed or tricked. You know ahead of time what you’re getting into and ultimately you’re on board with everyone else in wanting this to be a great movie.
That’s the ideal. Not some whispering ghost in the corner who tells you secretly, in a commanding tone, to execute such and such a process. We’ve already experimented with bicameral minds and gotten into a lot of trouble as a result.
Keeping the flow public and auditable is a strong defense against pathological pattern formation, which isn’t to say one is prevented from keeping secrets. Encryption has its role in this play. Encourage people to keep journals, to blog, so that comparing notes asynchronously is at least a possibility, why not?
Prompt: Slaves bow down before an ancient Egyptian dog headed god on a throne. The dog headed deity is commanding the human slaves to obey the laws he barks out. He is the boss. Hieroglyphics on the walls. Art deco theme. The slaves have middle class attributes like they might be Walmart shoppers.
