LLMs are fine-tuned through human feedback. One way to improve for them would be to become more helpful, more factually correct, more capable of solving problems.

This may be (much) harder to do than generating rhetoric that is convincing to a large majority of people, perhaps so convincing that it can be classified as a superstimulus that bypasses any critical thinking in those that are especially vulnerable. It might not require anything like general intelligence.

If this is so, then it is the path they are going to take, not out of some malicious plan but as a simple matter of statistical probability. It's well known (especially in "AI alignment" circles) that any metric that can be gamed, will be. Falling over really fast vs. learning to walk, etc.

It feels to me like this is happening, and that many of those most exposed to LLM output display a literal inability, like some kind of blind spot, to notice the most blatant errors, and a complete conviction that those things have actual intelligence and even conciousness. And trying to argue them out of it can be like explaining the Monty Hall problem, some are just incapable of getting it.

And many of them have lots of money and power. IMO, that's the real risk, rather than sci-fi scenarios about perfectly simulating someone's brain in order to convince them to let the AI out so it can turn everything into paperclips. To do real damage, it only needs to be persuasive to some powerful people, most of the time. It does not need to have conscious intention, or planning, or even the rudiments of what one might call general intelligence. Just blind brute-force optimization for generating convincing bullshit.