{"id":7814,"date":"2026-01-04T13:00:00","date_gmt":"2026-01-04T13:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/musictechohio.online\/site\/ai-godfather-self-preservation\/"},"modified":"2026-01-04T13:00:00","modified_gmt":"2026-01-04T13:00:00","slug":"ai-godfather-self-preservation","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/musictechohio.online\/site\/ai-godfather-self-preservation\/","title":{"rendered":"AI Godfather Warns That It\u2019s Starting to Show Signs of Self-Preservation"},"content":{"rendered":"
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If we\u2019re to believe Yoshua Bengio<\/a>, one of the so-called \u201cgodfathers\u201d of AI, some advanced models are showing signs of self-preservation \u2014 which is exactly why we shouldn\u2019t endow them with any kind of rights whatsoever. Because if we do, he says, they <\/strong>may run away with that autonomy and turn on us before we have a chance to pull the plug. Then it\u2019s curtains for this whole \u201chumankind\u201d experiment.<\/p>\n

\u201cFrontier AI models already show signs of self-preservation in experimental settings today, and eventually giving them rights would mean we\u2019re not allowed to shut them down,\u201d\u00a0Bengio told The Guardian<\/em> in a recent interview<\/a>.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u201cAs their capabilities and degree of agency grow,\u201d the Canadian computer scientist added, \u201cwe need to make sure we can rely on technical and societal guardrails to control them, including the ability to shut them down if needed.\u201d<\/p>\n

Bengio was one of the recipients of the 2018 Turing Award, along with Geoffrey Hinton and Meta\u2019s recently-ousted chief AI scientist Yann LeCun, earning the three of them the title of being \u201cgodfathers\u201d of AI. His comments are referring to experiments in which AI models refused or circumvented instructions or mechanisms intended to shut them down.\u00a0<\/p>\n

One study<\/a> published by AI safety group Palisade Research concluded such instances were evidence that top AI models like Google\u2019s Gemini line were developing \u201csurvival drives.\u201d The bots, in Palisade\u2019s experiments, ignore unambiguous prompts to turn off. A study from Claude-maker Anthropic found that its own chatbot and others would sometimes resort to blackmailing a user<\/a> when threatened with being turned off. Another study from the red teaming organization Apollo Research showed that OpenAI\u2019s ChatGPT models would attempt to avoid being replaced<\/a> with a more obedient model by \u201cself-exfiltrating\u201d itself onto another drive.<\/p>\n

While the findings of these experiments raise urgent question about the tech\u2019s safety, they don\u2019t suggest the AI models in question are sentient. It would also be a mistake to think of their \u201csurvival drives\u201d in the same terms as the biological imperatives found in nature. What may seem like signs of \u201cself-preservation\u201d are likely instead a consequence of how AI models pick up patterns in their training data \u2014 and are notoriously poor at accurately following instructions.<\/p>\n

Still, Bengio is worried about where it\u2019s all headed, arguing there\u2019s \u201creal scientific properties of consciousness\u201d in the human brain that machines could replicate. Yet how we perceive consciousness is a whole different ballgame, he says, because we tend to assume an AI can be conscious in the same way a human is.<\/p>\n

\u00a0\u201cPeople wouldn\u2019t care what kind of mechanisms are going on inside the AI,\u201d Bengio explained. \u201cWhat they care about is it feels like they\u2019re talking to an intelligent entity that has their own personality and goals. That is why there are so many people who are becoming attached to their AIs.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cThe phenomenon of subjective perception of consciousness is going to drive bad decisions,\u201d he warned.<\/p>\n

His advice? Think of AI models as hostile aliens.<\/p>\n

\u201cImagine some alien species came to the planet and at some point we realize that they have nefarious intentions for us,\u201d he told The Guardian<\/em>. \u201cDo we grant them citizenship and rights or do we defend our lives?\u201d<\/p>\n

More on AI:<\/strong> New Parents Mocked for Letting ChatGPT Name Their Baby<\/em><\/a><\/p>\n

The post AI Godfather Warns That It\u2019s Starting to Show Signs of Self-Preservation<\/a> appeared first on Futurism<\/a>.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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If we\u2019re to believe Yoshua Bengio, one of the so-called \u201cgodfathers\u201d of AI, some advanced models are showing signs of self-preservation \u2014 which is exactly why we shouldn\u2019t endow them…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[177],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-7814","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-artificial-intelligence"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/musictechohio.online\/site\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7814","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/musictechohio.online\/site\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/musictechohio.online\/site\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/musictechohio.online\/site\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/musictechohio.online\/site\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=7814"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/musictechohio.online\/site\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7814\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/musictechohio.online\/site\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=7814"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/musictechohio.online\/site\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=7814"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/musictechohio.online\/site\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=7814"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}