Combining Theory of Mind and Kindness for Self-Supervised Human-AI Alignment
This work aims to improve AI safety for critical infrastructures and everyday life, though it appears incremental as it builds on existing alignment concepts.
The paper tackles the problem of AI safety by addressing the limitations of current alignment methods like RLHF, which lack genuine understanding of human values and social intelligence, and proposes a novel human-inspired approach to align competing objectives.
As artificial intelligence (AI) becomes deeply integrated into critical infrastructures and everyday life, ensuring its safe deployment is one of humanity's most urgent challenges. Current AI models prioritize task optimization over safety, leading to risks of unintended harm. These risks are difficult to address due to the competing interests of governments, businesses, and advocacy groups, all of which have different priorities in the AI race. Current alignment methods, such as reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF), focus on extrinsic behaviors without instilling a genuine understanding of human values. These models are vulnerable to manipulation and lack the social intelligence necessary to infer the mental states and intentions of others, raising concerns about their ability to safely and responsibly make important decisions in complex and novel situations. Furthermore, the divergence between extrinsic and intrinsic motivations in AI introduces the risk of deceptive or harmful behaviors, particularly as systems become more autonomous and intelligent. We propose a novel human-inspired approach which aims to address these various concerns and help align competing objectives.