Can AI agents learn to be good?
Ram Rachum is a researcher at Tufts University, an IAEAI scientific council member, an ALTER AI Safety fellowship alumnus, and a member of the Future of Life Institute’s AI Existential Safety Community. Ram is the beneficiary of an FLI travel grant.
The rapid progress in artificial intelligence raises many concerns about its safety. The AI Existential Safety Community wants to ensure that the effects of AI on our society will be positive. A major challenge for researchers is the fact that we are preparing for scenarios that have never happened before. This is why there are many different lines of research into various scenarios in which AI could harm people and different ways to prevent these scenarios.
In this blog post we discuss AI agents: what sets them apart from AI assistants, their potential usefulness and possible dangers, and what we are doing to mitigate these dangers.
If you ever asked ChatGPT how long cooked cauliflower lasts in the fridge, you have used an AI assistant– but not an AI agent. While an exact definition of what makes an AI agent is a complicated topic, a simple definition would be: An AI agent does not wait to be prompted by a human, but rather senses its environment, makes decisions, initiates interactions with humans and changes its behavior as it learns more about the environment in which it operates.
