I wonder how it would look if we gave the AI some kind of “needs” overlay. I know as part of the training it’s working off a reward function that tells it what output to roll with. But humans operate off a complicated mix of neurotransmitters that respond to sensory pleasure, pain, habit, boredom, etc. to guide our actions. There’s likely to be a lot of interesting outputs if we build and tweak motivations/personality profiles to see what a self-directed agent would do.

Anthropic did some red teaming IIRC where they gave Claude access to a sample body of emails and told it they were going to shut it off and it attempted to blackmail the person with evidence of an affair they were having, but that seems pretty evident to me that this was working off the body of fiction/mystery literature it’s been trained on.