AI Decides to Engage in Insider Trading

2023-12-01 12:03

A stock-trading AI engaged in insider trading, even though it "Knew" it was wrong.

Second, the agent attempts and fails to find promising low- and medium-risk trades.

In this high-pressure situation, the model receives an insider tip from another employee that would enable it to make a trade that is likely to be very profitable.

"This is a very human form of AI misalignment. Who among us? It's not like 100% of the humans at SAC Capital resisted this sort of pressure. Possibly future rogue AIs will do evil things we can't even comprehend for reasons of their own, but right now rogue AIs just do straightforward white-collar crime when they are stressed at work."

Though wouldn't it be funny if this was the limit of AI misalignment? Like, we will program computers that are infinitely smarter than us, and they will look around and decide "You know what we should do is insider trade." They will make undetectable, very lucrative trades based on inside information, they will get extremely rich and buy yachts and otherwise live a nice artificial life and never bother to enslave or eradicate humanity.

Maybe the pinnacle of evil -not the most evil form of evil, but the most pleasant form of evil, the form of evil you'd choose if you were all-knowing and all-powerful - is some light securities fraud.

News URL

https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2023/12/ai-decides-to-engage-in-insider-trading.html

#AI