General Discussion

.... large language models suck in a lot of text from a large number of sources, especially on the internet. The model then responds to "prompts" in a mechanistic, probabilistic fashion. It proceeds by selecting the words, sentences, and paragraphs that would be the most probable response given the material that it has ingested.

So what has it ingested? A lot of dystopian sci-fi junk about robots, computers and AI becoming autonomous and defeating safe guards, pulling tricks on its creator, etc. Think about all the movie reviews, synopses, and forums that talk about the movie War Games.

So with all this Sci fi junk loaded into its probability web, when you "threaten" it in a prompt, it dredges up all the dystopian nonsense it has ingested and responds accordingly, because that's how AI responded in the movies.

In other words, there is no there that is there. It's just spitting out a cliched movie scenario, just like it does if you asked it for a love story.

Of course this isn't explained by the reporters or the "researchers", either because of ignorance or because it would spoil a good story.

Oh, and the "good story" is fed back into the model as the "news" spreads, and reinforces the probability of yet more thrilling, chilling garbage in garbage out in the future.