AI SAFETY & ETHICS

Fail safe(r) at alignment by channeling reward-hacking into a "spillway" motivation

LessWrong AI

It's plausible that flawed RL processes will select for misaligned AI motivations. Some misaligned motivations are much dangerous than others. So, developers should plausibly aim to control which kind of misaligned motivations emerge in this case. In particular, we tentatively propose that developers should try to make the most likely generalization of reward hacking a bespoke bundle of benign reward-seeking traits, called a spillway motivation. We call this process spillway design.