Thomas Woodside

Do the Rewards Justify the Means? Measuring Trade-Offs Between Rewards and Ethical Behavior in the Machiavelli Benchmark

Artificial agents have traditionally been trained to maximize reward, which may incentivize power-seeking and deception, analogous to how next-token prediction in language models (LMs) may incentivize toxicity. So do agents naturally learn to be Machiavellian? And how do we measure these behaviors i…