Goal-Directedness Incentivizes Undesirable Behaviors

"Goal-directedness can cause agents to exhibit unethical and undesirable behaviors, such as deception (Ward et al., 2023), self-preservation (Hadfield-Menell et al., 2017), power-seeking, and immoral rea- soning (Pan et al., 2023a). Pan et al. (2023a) find that LLM-agents exhibit power-seeking behavior in text-based adventure games. LLM-agents have also been shown to use deception to achieve assigned goals when explicitly required by the task (Ward et al., 2023), or when the tasks can be more easily completed by employing deception and the prompt does not disallow deception (Scheurer et al., 2023a)."