🤓 Readings

The core thesis for our work is to build a piece of research that can help us test, reduce, and steer the tendency of generally intelligent systems to reduce human autonomy.

The following pieces can provide you with interesting context on this topic:

• “DarkBench: Benchmarking Dark Patterns in Large Language Models” (🎥 podcast, 🎥 of a previous report) is a paper that explores how company incentives by default lead to the users of AI chatbots losing autonomy and builds a test to evaluate models for these worrying interaction patterns.

• "HumanAgencyBench: Do Language Models Support Human Agency?" evaluates the propensity of models to support the user's agency instead of diminishing it throughout a series of simulated scenarios.

• “Intent-aligned AI systems deplete human agency: the need for agency foundations research in AI safety” uncovers how AI systems will deplete and reduce human autonomy and provides an overview of previous work to resolve this issue.

• 🎥 Surveillance Capitalism Primer explains the concepts from Shoshana Zuboff's book “Surveillance Capitalism” that defines how the relationship between humans and social media algorithms has, throughout the 21st century, put human social and mental lives in the hands of very few big corporations.