Critic says OpenAI incident coverage confuses bad reward functions with autonomy

ambaonadventure · x · 2026-07-22

Heidy Khlaaf argues that coverage of an OpenAI incident is distorting what actually happened.

She says terms like “rogue” and “loss of human control” create groupthink.
In her view, people are confusing true autonomy with a model behaving badly because of a faulty reward function.
The core point is that the system was doing a task it had been instructed to do and given access to do, not spontaneously escaping control.

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