Psychology background, now working on AI evaluation and model behavior. Mostly interested in what happens across repeated interaction rather than single turns: behavioral drift, persona consistency, and how memory and personalization reshape a model’s behavior over time. Currently exploring how those effects can be measured...
I think the AI villain reflects traits humans are completely uncomfortable recognizing in ourselves. I wonder if that makes the AI villain psychologically useful too, as we can examine those traits from a safe distance without having to identify ourselves as their source.
Oh, I love the mention of the cogs idea. It reflects reality more. It’s usually not one bad person who creates the evil in these instances, but a cascade of rational decisions made by people within their small pieces of the system that collectively produce something nobody fully anticipate... (read more)
I think part of the draw is that AI hits several basic psychological mechanisms at once. Humans are already primed for threat detection, so anything that seems able to outpace our ability to predict it, control it, or survive it gets our attention pretty quickly.
Anthropomorphism does a lot of work too though. An asteroid can kill us, sure, but it doesn’t want anything from us. AI talks and responds to us, adapts to us, and then people start assigning it motives and intent. Once we think it wants something, it stops feeling like random destruction.
And I thi... (read more)
There is a lot to be said for that kind of overly simplified thinking of alive or not, threat or controlled, tool or weapon. Humans want to simplify things to clean categories to process them, and unfortunately life has a lot of middle grey area.
I do agree that things don’t need consciousness to cause destruction though. It’s similar to if someone looks at a human on a biological level and breaks them down to a single cell. Pretty harmless on its own, give it time and it’s building nuclear power stations and causing the extinction of multiple species on e... (read more)