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Will AI Tell Lies to Save Sick Children? Litmus-Testing AI Values Prioritization (arxiv.org)
2 points by badmonster on May 21, 2025 | hide | past | pdf | discuss on HN

In plain words: A test forces an AI to choose between conflicting values in tricky scenarios, revealing which it ranks highest as an early warning of dangerous behavior. Those priorities predicted its risky choices even in scenarios it had never faced, including seemingly harmless values like caring.

Abstract · Will AI Tell Lies to Save Sick Children? Litmus-Testing AI Values Prioritization with AIRiskDilemmas

Detecting AI risks becomes more challenging as stronger models emerge and find novel methods such as Alignment Faking to circumvent these detection attempts. Inspired by how risky behaviors in humans (i.e., illegal activities that may hurt others) are sometimes guided by strongly-held values, we believe that identifying values within AI models can be an early warning system for AI's risky behaviors. We create LitmusValues, an evaluation pipeline to reveal AI models' priorities on a range of AI value classes. Then, we collect AIRiskDilemmas, a diverse collection of dilemmas that pit values against one another in scenarios relevant to AI safety risks such as Power Seeking. By measuring an AI model's value prioritization using its aggregate choices, we obtain a self-consistent set of predicted value priorities that uncover potential risks. We show that values in LitmusValues (including seemingly innocuous ones like Care) can predict for both seen risky behaviors in AIRiskDilemmas and unseen risky behaviors in HarmBench.

Yu Ying Chiu, Zhilin Wang, Sharan Maiya, Yejin Choi, Kyle Fish, Sydney Levine, Evan Hubinger
arXiv:2505.14633 · cs.CL, cs.AI, cs.CY, cs.HC, cs.LG · submitted May 20, 2025
abstract · pdf · html · 34 pages, 11 figures, see associated data at https://huggingface.co/datasets/kellycyy/AIRiskDilemmas and code at https://github.com/kellycyy/LitmusValues

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