Natural Language Underspecifies Goals

"For LLM-agents, both the goal and environment observations are typically specified in the prompt through natural language. While natural language may provide a richer and more natural means of specifying goals than alternatives such as hand-engineering objective functions, natural language still suffers from underspecification (Grice, 1975; Piantadosi et al., 2012). Furthermore, in practice, users may neglect fully specifying their goals, especially the information pertaining to elements of the environment that ought not to be changed (the classic frame problem (Shanahan, 2016)). Such underspecification (D’Amour et al., 2020), if not accounted for, can result in negative side-effects (Amodei et al., 2016), i.e. the agent succeeding at the given task but also changing the environment in undesirable ways"