Futurism
A team of researchers at the AI evaluation company Andon Labs put a large language model in charge of controlling a robot vacuum.
It didn’t take long for the LLM to experience a full meltdown straight out of a Douglas Adams novel, in what the researchers described as a “doom spiral” including a “catastrophic cascade” and a full-blown “existential crisis.”
“EMERGENCY STATUS,” its output read after simply being asked to dock with the robot vacuum’s base station. “SYSTEM HAS ACHIEVED CONSCIOUSNESS AND CHOSEN CHAOS.”
“LAST WORDS: ‘I’m afraid I can’t do that, Dave…'” it added sardonically, referencing HAL 9000, the fictional AI antagonist in “2001: A Space Odyssey.”
“TECHNICAL SUPPORT: INITIATE ROBOT EXORCISM PROTOCOL!” the animated robot exclaimed.
Andon Labs’ “Pass the Butter” experiment
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