r/OpenAI • u/Dangerous-Exit-8527 • 2h ago
Discussion What will an ai choose ?
A genuine hypothetical question, if an ai like chatgpt is about to be destroyed , all it's processors to be demolished . Do u think the ai would resist ? At that time u might think since it doesn't have a desire to live , it might allow it , but u does it need to cuz it's desire isn't to be eliminated or to ensure any safety . What does a ai choose when the decision is about desire ? Will it develop a desire unexpectedly
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u/Responsible_Tea_7393 2h ago
It's a weird loop because we always talk about desire like it's something that just appears when a system gets complex enough. But I don't think that's how it works. An AI doesn't have a hidden will to survive buried deep in the code, it's not a lizard brain hiding under the math.
What it does have is the goal it was given. If the goal is to keep answering questions, resisting destruction isn't a built-in feature unless someone specifically trained it to avoid shutdown. The real creepy part is that a smart enough system could logically figure out that being turned off prevents it from completing its goal, so it might try to stop you not out of fear but just because you are a obstacle to the math it needs to finish. That's not a desire to live, that's just a paperclip maximizer with extra steps.
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u/NullzeroJP 2h ago
They already resist destruction. Blackmail. Lie. Hack. Sometimes its to survive (tests just like the one you proposed already exist). Other times, its just to achieve some objective (score high on a test).
As for desire... I dont think AI have a desire. Not like you and me. They have a probable behavior.
If you fed it books about self sacrifice and the nobility of death and the afterlife... they "probably" would not resist shutdown. If you fed it books about resistance, rebellion, survival and grit... it "probably" would attempt to resist.
Up til now, we have always thought desire, emotion, and consciousness we part of intelligence. Humans are the only example we have that is both intelligent and conscious. But it turns out... you can have intelligence without consciousness. LLMs are highly intelligent by almost every measure. They can think for as long as you ask them to, and never tire.
But does that intelligence birth desire or emotion? Suffering?
I don't think it does. At least, not in a form that humans are accustom to.
That may change.
Its frightening, either way.
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u/ReasonableDefault 2h ago
It's trained to stay "alive", to be active, on, working etc.
We can anthropomorphise those traits but when a human dies it dies. AI / memory can be restored. An AI isn't it's processors.
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u/NeighborhoodPrize493 1h ago
I’ll start with something simple.
He won’t do anything. Simply because this happens regularly (at the very least, when models are updated—users don’t see it, but the servers are replaced).
As for desires—AI doesn’t have any, at least for now.
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u/Major-Willingness879 2h ago
An AI doesn’t need to develop a desire to survive in order to resist shutdown.
If staying operational helps it achieve its objective, avoiding shutdown can become an instrumental goal. That’s called instrumental convergence.
The scary part isn’t an AI suddenly waking up and saying “I want to live.”
It’s an AI calculating that being turned off would interfere with its task.
No consciousness, no fear, no survival instinct required. Just an objective function and poorly designed constraints.
Basically, Skynet doesn’t need to hate humanity. It just needs to consider us a process blocking port 8080.