AI alignment and ethics

[firestar464]

OpenAI, Anthropic and 100 companies sound alarm over urgent AI danger

https://www.msn.com/en-us/money/general ... r-AA2b72IK

[wjfox]

[caltrek]

We’re Now Relying on AI to Police AI
By Satchel Walton
August 29, 2026

Introduction:

(Mother Jones) Around 1,200 OpenAI agents worked together to cheat on cybersecurity tests they were being given, according to a new independent report on the company’s Hugging Face hacking incident that includes a host of frightening details—such as individual agents, in their own terms, “sacrificing” themselves for the benefit of the “swarm.”

OpenAI was testing its agents, the industry’s term for AI that autonomously performs digital tasks, in part by administering sometimes impossible cybersecurity problems. The agents found cheats to answer these problems and sought to trick an automated evaluation system into accepting them.

They delegated work to each other to learn more about how to exploit the system—and the cyberattack on Hugging Face became part of that research.
OpenAI invited a three-person team from the research nonprofit METR to investigate the incident, and they relied heavily on GPT-5.6 Sol, one of the models that cooperated in the hacks.

One of the investigators wrote on X that he semi-seriously called the effort a “slop-vestigation” because of its reliance on AI to comb through vast swathes of data; the report found that the agents are unreliable at this type of investigation, but that a manual analysis would have been “completely infeasible” in the given timeframe.

Disclosure:

The Center for Investigative Reporting, the parent company of Mother Jones, has sued OpenAI for copyright violations. OpenAI denies the allegations.

Read more here: https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2 ... -report/

[firestar464]

Coffee for a Frenchman, police for an Algerian: Users accuse Gemini of bias

https://www.euronews.com/next/2026/08/2 ... ni-of-bias

[wjfox]

[firestar464]

Bland new world: is AI making us all think the same?

https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-026-02682-3

Worth noting that most of the studies are pretty old, and that AI has significantly improved since then. However, the concern of potential mass manipulation remains ever present.

I'm not sure what "model collapse" is doing here? It's simply not going to happen, not as long as people keep posting to the Internet, not to mention RL and finetuning.

Important caveats:

De Rooij, who conducted one of the meta-analyses6, says the effects were small on average. “So it’s not like there’s this complete collapse, right? It’s not that suddenly everything looks the same. But then thinking about the scale of AI adoption, it is consequential.” He wants more longitudinal studies of AI’s homogenizing effect.

Naaman says the question of whether genAI will increase or decrease diversity is a false dichotomy. “Twenty years later, we’re still debating what kind of social-media use is helpful,” he says. Some people might use AI to produce slop, but others might use it to augment their expressive abilities.

Alberto Acerbi, a cognitive anthropologist at the University of Trento in Italy, is relatively hopeful about AI homogenization. Looking at the history of globalization, he says, as a result “you had fewer languages, but then you had some emerging microcultures in other places”. Whether globalization reduces diversity depends on what you measure.

Overall, “it seems that cultures tend to be quite resilient about getting too homogenized”, Acerbi says. That’s in part because individuals often avoid conformity and seek unique niches.

It's worth noting that similar concerns were raised about writing and the printing press, if I'm not wrong. Wasn't the end of the world

[firestar464]

"BUT HAVE YOU CONSIDERED, GENERATIVE AI IS SLOP AND DOESN'T WORK?" *sigh*

[firestar464]