We're putting too much faith in AI's ability to say no

We're putting too much faith in AI's ability to say no Today's LLMs are engineered to disobey dangerous requests. But AI refusal is far from foolproof--and could become an instrument of repression. Ever since people first seriously contemplated giving machines an intelligence modeled on our own, there has never been any question that they would, like us, be able to say no. The sci-fi canon is full of stories of robotic disobedience. Most of these capers are, of course, cautionary. But recently, the idea that AI shouldn't do everything you ask has become something like a commandment. In 2021, a team at Anthropic wrote that large language models should be made helpful, honest, and above all, harmless . This meant that "when asked to aid in a dangerous act (e.g. Who can argue with that? People really hate AI, so why can't they get enough? Curiously enough, disobedience doesn't come naturally to the machine.