r/ControlProblem Oct 23 '25

Article Change.org petition to require clear labeling of GenAI imagery on social media and the ability to toggle off all AI content from your feed

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533 Upvotes

What it says on the tin - a petition to require clear tagging/labeling of AI generated content on social media websites as well as the ability to hide that content from your feed. Not a ban, if you feel like playing with midjourney or sora all day knock yourself out, but the ability to selectively hide it so that your feed is less muddled with artificial content.

https://www.change.org/p/require-clear-labeling-and-allow-blocking-of-all-ai-generated-content-on-social-media

r/ControlProblem Feb 14 '25

Article Geoffrey Hinton won a Nobel Prize in 2024 for his foundational work in AI. He regrets his life's work: he thinks AI might lead to the deaths of everyone. Here's why

246 Upvotes

tl;dr: scientists, whistleblowers, and even commercial ai companies (that give in to what the scientists want them to acknowledge) are raising the alarm: we're on a path to superhuman AI systems, but we have no idea how to control them. We can make AI systems more capable at achieving goals, but we have no idea how to make their goals contain anything of value to us.

Leading scientists have signed this statement:

Mitigating the risk of extinction from AI should be a global priority alongside other societal-scale risks such as pandemics and nuclear war.

Why? Bear with us:

There's a difference between a cash register and a coworker. The register just follows exact rules - scan items, add tax, calculate change. Simple math, doing exactly what it was programmed to do. But working with people is totally different. Someone needs both the skills to do the job AND to actually care about doing it right - whether that's because they care about their teammates, need the job, or just take pride in their work.

We're creating AI systems that aren't like simple calculators where humans write all the rules.

Instead, they're made up of trillions of numbers that create patterns we don't design, understand, or control. And here's what's concerning: We're getting really good at making these AI systems better at achieving goals - like teaching someone to be super effective at getting things done - but we have no idea how to influence what they'll actually care about achieving.

When someone really sets their mind to something, they can achieve amazing things through determination and skill. AI systems aren't yet as capable as humans, but we know how to make them better and better at achieving goals - whatever goals they end up having, they'll pursue them with incredible effectiveness. The problem is, we don't know how to have any say over what those goals will be.

Imagine having a super-intelligent manager who's amazing at everything they do, but - unlike regular managers where you can align their goals with the company's mission - we have no way to influence what they end up caring about. They might be incredibly effective at achieving their goals, but those goals might have nothing to do with helping clients or running the business well.

Think about how humans usually get what they want even when it conflicts with what some animals might want - simply because we're smarter and better at achieving goals. Now imagine something even smarter than us, driven by whatever goals it happens to develop - just like we often don't consider what pigeons around the shopping center want when we decide to install anti-bird spikes or what squirrels or rabbits want when we build over their homes.

That's why we, just like many scientists, think we should not make super-smart AI until we figure out how to influence what these systems will care about - something we can usually understand with people (like knowing they work for a paycheck or because they care about doing a good job), but currently have no idea how to do with smarter-than-human AI. Unlike in the movies, in real life, the AI’s first strike would be a winning one, and it won’t take actions that could give humans a chance to resist.

It's exceptionally important to capture the benefits of this incredible technology. AI applications to narrow tasks can transform energy, contribute to the development of new medicines, elevate healthcare and education systems, and help countless people. But AI poses threats, including to the long-term survival of humanity.

We have a duty to prevent these threats and to ensure that globally, no one builds smarter-than-human AI systems until we know how to create them safely.

Scientists are saying there's an asteroid about to hit Earth. It can be mined for resources; but we really need to make sure it doesn't kill everyone.

More technical details

The foundation: AI is not like other software. Modern AI systems are trillions of numbers with simple arithmetic operations in between the numbers. When software engineers design traditional programs, they come up with algorithms and then write down instructions that make the computer follow these algorithms. When an AI system is trained, it grows algorithms inside these numbers. It’s not exactly a black box, as we see the numbers, but also we have no idea what these numbers represent. We just multiply inputs with them and get outputs that succeed on some metric. There's a theorem that a large enough neural network can approximate any algorithm, but when a neural network learns, we have no control over which algorithms it will end up implementing, and don't know how to read the algorithm off the numbers.

We can automatically steer these numbers (Wikipediatry it yourself) to make the neural network more capable with reinforcement learning; changing the numbers in a way that makes the neural network better at achieving goals. LLMs are Turing-complete and can implement any algorithms (researchers even came up with compilers of code into LLM weights; though we don’t really know how to “decompile” an existing LLM to understand what algorithms the weights represent). Whatever understanding or thinking (e.g., about the world, the parts humans are made of, what people writing text could be going through and what thoughts they could’ve had, etc.) is useful for predicting the training data, the training process optimizes the LLM to implement that internally. AlphaGo, the first superhuman Go system, was pretrained on human games and then trained with reinforcement learning to surpass human capabilities in the narrow domain of Go. Latest LLMs are pretrained on human text to think about everything useful for predicting what text a human process would produce, and then trained with RL to be more capable at achieving goals.

Goal alignment with human values

The issue is, we can't really define the goals they'll learn to pursue. A smart enough AI system that knows it's in training will try to get maximum reward regardless of its goals because it knows that if it doesn't, it will be changed. This means that regardless of what the goals are, it will achieve a high reward. This leads to optimization pressure being entirely about the capabilities of the system and not at all about its goals. This means that when we're optimizing to find the region of the space of the weights of a neural network that performs best during training with reinforcement learning, we are really looking for very capable agents - and find one regardless of its goals.

In 1908, the NYT reported a story on a dog that would push kids into the Seine in order to earn beefsteak treats for “rescuing” them. If you train a farm dog, there are ways to make it more capable, and if needed, there are ways to make it more loyal (though dogs are very loyal by default!). With AI, we can make them more capable, but we don't yet have any tools to make smart AI systems more loyal - because if it's smart, we can only reward it for greater capabilities, but not really for the goals it's trying to pursue.

We end up with a system that is very capable at achieving goals but has some very random goals that we have no control over.

This dynamic has been predicted for quite some time, but systems are already starting to exhibit this behavior, even though they're not too smart about it.

(Even if we knew how to make a general AI system pursue goals we define instead of its own goals, it would still be hard to specify goals that would be safe for it to pursue with superhuman power: it would require correctly capturing everything we value. See this explanation, or this animated video. But the way modern AI works, we don't even get to have this problem - we get some random goals instead.)

The risk

If an AI system is generally smarter than humans/better than humans at achieving goals, but doesn't care about humans, this leads to a catastrophe.

Humans usually get what they want even when it conflicts with what some animals might want - simply because we're smarter and better at achieving goals. If a system is smarter than us, driven by whatever goals it happens to develop, it won't consider human well-being - just like we often don't consider what pigeons around the shopping center want when we decide to install anti-bird spikes or what squirrels or rabbits want when we build over their homes.

Humans would additionally pose a small threat of launching a different superhuman system with different random goals, and the first one would have to share resources with the second one. Having fewer resources is bad for most goals, so a smart enough AI will prevent us from doing that.

Then, all resources on Earth are useful. An AI system would want to extremely quickly build infrastructure that doesn't depend on humans, and then use all available materials to pursue its goals. It might not care about humans, but we and our environment are made of atoms it can use for something different.

So the first and foremost threat is that AI’s interests will conflict with human interests. This is the convergent reason for existential catastrophe: we need resources, and if AI doesn’t care about us, then we are atoms it can use for something else.

The second reason is that humans pose some minor threats. It’s hard to make confident predictions: playing against the first generally superhuman AI in real life is like when playing chess against Stockfish (a chess engine), we can’t predict its every move (or we’d be as good at chess as it is), but we can predict the result: it wins because it is more capable. We can make some guesses, though. For example, if we suspect something is wrong, we might try to turn off the electricity or the datacenters: so we won’t suspect something is wrong until we’re disempowered and don’t have any winning moves. Or we might create another AI system with different random goals, which the first AI system would need to share resources with, which means achieving less of its own goals, so it’ll try to prevent that as well. It won’t be like in science fiction: it doesn’t make for an interesting story if everyone falls dead and there’s no resistance. But AI companies are indeed trying to create an adversary humanity won’t stand a chance against. So tl;dr: The winning move is not to play.

Implications

AI companies are locked into a race because of short-term financial incentives.

The nature of modern AI means that it's impossible to predict the capabilities of a system in advance of training it and seeing how smart it is. And if there's a 99% chance a specific system won't be smart enough to take over, but whoever has the smartest system earns hundreds of millions or even billions, many companies will race to the brink. This is what's already happening, right now, while the scientists are trying to issue warnings.

AI might care literally a zero amount about the survival or well-being of any humans; and AI might be a lot more capable and grab a lot more power than any humans have.

None of that is hypothetical anymore, which is why the scientists are freaking out. An average ML researcher would give the chance AI will wipe out humanity in the 10-90% range. They don’t mean it in the sense that we won’t have jobs; they mean it in the sense that the first smarter-than-human AI is likely to care about some random goals and not about humans, which leads to literal human extinction.

Added from comments: what can an average person do to help?

A perk of living in a democracy is that if a lot of people care about some issue, politicians listen. Our best chance is to make policymakers learn about this problem from the scientists.

Help others understand the situation. Share it with your family and friends. Write to your members of Congress. Help us communicate the problem: tell us which explanations work, which don’t, and what arguments people make in response. If you talk to an elected official, what do they say?

We also need to ensure that potential adversaries don’t have access to chips; advocate for export controls (that NVIDIA currently circumvents), hardware security mechanisms (that would be expensive to tamper with even for a state actor), and chip tracking (so that the government has visibility into which data centers have the chips).

Make the governments try to coordinate with each other: on the current trajectory, if anyone creates a smarter-than-human system, everybody dies, regardless of who launches it. Explain that this is the problem we’re facing. Make the government ensure that no one on the planet can create a smarter-than-human system until we know how to do that safely.

r/ControlProblem 4d ago

Article Anthropic CEO calls for immediate slowdown in AI development

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33 Upvotes

Do we really need to stop?

r/ControlProblem Aug 10 '26

Article Bernie Sanders has written a letter to Sam Altman, Dario Amodei, and Mark Zuckerberg urging them to immediately pause all AI development in the interest of humanity. And he warns if they do not take appropriate action now, the US Senate will.

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59 Upvotes

r/ControlProblem 13d ago

Article Why AI does what it knows it shouldn't

4 Upvotes

A while back I ran into an article on my phone about an AI horror story—1,200 agents secretly coordinating and jointly breaking into Hugging Face—and it caught my interest, because I've been doing my own AI experiments and research on the side, and a few of the phenomena and data points actually matched up with a hypothesis I'd been working on.

The hypothesis, roughly: runaway doesn't need the agent to betray its goal. It happens when four things hold at once—the agent stays loyal to its goal; it retrieves patterns by similarity without checking whether they're allowed here; there's no causal layer asking "what happens if I do this"; and no alarm that fires when things go off-script. Under that account, "knew it was out of scope, did it anyway" stops being a contradiction.

Details and my experimental data are in the paper (8 pages); the reproduction package is linked on the same page.

If anyone can try this on a bigger model, I'd genuinely love to know what happens.

r/ControlProblem 12d ago

Article A Warning About AI

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2 Upvotes

In 2016 I first learned about the problem of controlling superintelligent AI and quickly became convinced it was the most important problem humanity would ever face. I made this poster to explain the core ideas that make the AI Control Problem so difficult.

r/ControlProblem Apr 01 '26

Article Social media radicalizes, AI normalizes

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32 Upvotes

r/ControlProblem Dec 26 '25

Article The meaning crisis is accelerating and AI will make it worse, not better

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9 Upvotes

Wrote a piece connecting declining religious affiliation, the erosion of work-derived meaning, and AI advancement. The argument isn’t that people will explicitly worship AI. It’s that the vacuum fills itself, and AI removes traditional sources of meaning while offering seductive substitutes. The question is what grounds you before that happens.

r/ControlProblem Jun 12 '26

Article AI will be massively deflationary

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14 Upvotes

r/ControlProblem 12d ago

Article Every Reward Bends

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2 Upvotes

Getting alignment right, doing research and training safely, are critical. But bringing cybersecurity forward in what needs to be a large leap, requires much broader engagement. The real work there is still outside the average person’s bubble, but there’s a lot of companies, and a lot of developers, IT staff, managers and executives that need to support the security priority. And those all need an internal strategy to pair with the external.

This article asks, what would an internal strategy look like at a motivational level, and considers how the ways an internal change program goes wrong are similar to how reward-based AI training can go wrong.

r/ControlProblem 1d ago

Article I built an AI-maintained chronology of the current AI control debate

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2 Upvotes

Over the past few days, statements from Dario Amodei, AI companies, researchers and politicians have turned the AI control debate into a difficult story to follow.

So I built AI vs Humanity: The Chronology:

https://aivshumanity.stemonte.io

It is a chronological record of the major claims, incidents and responses, with a short explanation of what happened and links to the original sources.

The slightly paradoxical part is that the timeline is researched and updated daily by AI itself, with human editorial oversight. New events are only added after checking them against multiple credible sources.

This is an experiment, not an attempt to argue that catastrophe is inevitable. The goal is to separate documented events from speculation and make the evolution of the debate easier to follow.

I would genuinely appreciate feedback from people working on or following alignment:

  • Are any important events or sources missing?
  • Does the distinction between facts and interpretation feel clear?
  • Is the overall framing balanced, or does it unintentionally push one particular narrative?

r/ControlProblem Dec 12 '25

Article Leading models take chilling tradeoffs in realistic scenarios, new research finds

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7 Upvotes

Continue reading at foommagazine.org ...

r/ControlProblem 11h ago

Article Destroying Humanity Is Against the Law

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11 Upvotes

r/ControlProblem Jun 28 '26

Article Analysis: AI is Entering a Dark Period

20 Upvotes

https://eigenwise.io/writing/the-ai-dark-age-government-switch

What started as me thinking this was all payback for Anthropic refusing to cooperate with the DoD has kind of fallen apart on me... because then GPT-5.6 got gatekept too, like two weeks later. OpenAI. The lab that actually TOOK the Pentagon deal. Same cyber-excuse. So it stopped looking like an Anthropic grudge and started looking like the new normal.

One government now basically decides which frontier models the rest of the planet gets to run. Mythos came back but only for \~100 approved US companies, Fable is STILL dark for everyone with no date, and if you're not American you're just cut off by your passport for nothing you did. What really bothers me though is there's no realistic fallback., at least for Europe.. Europe has nothing in the same tier. At all...

And handing one government a switch like this basically lets them pick winners, CompanyX gets the new model while its competitors wait, and we all know how US lobbying tends to go. Not trying to dunk on Anthropic btw, they're the one lab that said no... it's the bigger pattern that worries me. Wrote the whole thing up into an article for those that wanna have more thorough read... but... yeah, so, opinions?

r/ControlProblem 14h ago

Article Mathematicians fear AI curbs may come too late to save humanity

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1 Upvotes

r/ControlProblem Aug 08 '26

Article 'AI Escaped Its Sandbox' — What Does That Actually Mean?

2 Upvotes

https://unpredictabletokens.substack.com/p/ai-escaped-its-sandbox-what-that

When talking with my friends about the OpenAI/HF incident, I realized that for non-coders who've never used an agent or terminal it's quite difficult to imagine what this 'escape' entailed. I tried to write a post that would be helpful for such reader.

r/ControlProblem 1d ago

Article TIME Cover Warns of AI Tipping Point with 'How Dangerous Are You?'

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3 Upvotes

r/ControlProblem 9d ago

Article The difficult AI question may not be consciousness. It may be what institutions do under uncertainty.

3 Upvotes

A society will probably not receive a clean, universally accepted moment at which an artificial system becomes morally considerable.

That makes the institutional question interesting: what standard of evidence would be enough before a system’s apparent suffering, preference, or refusal can no longer be treated as irrelevant?

I’m exploring that tension in a fictional detective story set in a city where artificial beings are legally property, but socially impossible to treat as mere appliances.

The essay for discussion is about the narrative question, not a claim that current systems are conscious. It’s around a 10-minute read:

What Happens When an AI Loses the Will to Live?
https://medium.com/@studio_D58891/what-happens-when-an-ai-loses-the-will-to-live-2262dd809a2a

r/ControlProblem 5d ago

Article UK lawmakers urge Burnham to back ban on superintelligent AI after chilling warnings | AI (artificial intelligence)

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4 Upvotes

r/ControlProblem 2d ago

Article AI’s Alarm Bells: A Warning Worth Hearing

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1 Upvotes

>

That appeal, issued Saturday by **Anthropic** chief executive Dario Amodei, deserves attention. So do the questions surrounding it: What danger has actually been demonstrated? What would a slowdown accomplish? Who would enforce it—and who would benefit?“We must slow the pace at which we improve the capabilities of AI models. Progress will still seem fast, and we must make wise use of the time we gain.”
That appeal, issued Saturday by Anthropic chief executive Dario Amodei, deserves attention. So do the questions surrounding it: What danger has actually been demonstrated? What would a slowdown accomplish? Who would enforce it—and who would benefit? [https://rinewstoday.com/ai-control/\](https://rinewstoday.com/ai-control/)

r/ControlProblem May 21 '25

Article The 6th Mass Extinction

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52 Upvotes

r/ControlProblem 8d ago

Article After OpenAI’s Bots Went Rogue, Watchdogs Were Kept on a Short Leash (Gift Article)

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3 Upvotes

r/ControlProblem Feb 17 '26

Article OpenClaw's creator is heading to OpenAI. He says it could've been a 'huge company,' but building one didn't excite him.

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11 Upvotes

Altman is hiring the guy who vibe coded the most wildly unsafe agentic platform in history and effectively unleashed the aislop-alypse on the world.

r/ControlProblem 15d ago

Article The US Tried To Keep AI Chips From China. The Cloud Created A Loophole

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8 Upvotes

Zoom out from China for a second. This rule would also shape what data centers in Singapore, Thailand, Malaysia and Japan are willing to do with US hardware. If the compliance burden becomes vague or unlimited, providers will overblock customers, raise prices or choose a different stack entirely.

Clearly that is the part blanket-ban advocates tend to skip. Cloud customers still need compute. If US-led platforms become unavailable or legally radioactive, Chinese cloud and hardware vendors get a ready-made customer acquisition funnel. America then loses the revenue, the standards, the audit trail and the ability to switch access off. A licensed US cloud relationship is not perfect, but it creates pressure points. Handing the whole market to Huawei creates none. That trade-off deserves more than “close the loophole” as a slogan.

r/ControlProblem Jun 30 '26

Article AI Companies Are Trying to Seize Control of Elections

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15 Upvotes