Ask A Genius 1407: AI Blackmail, Consciousness Models, and Why He Avoids Music
Author(s): Rick Rosner and Scott Douglas Jacobsen
Publication (Outlet/Website): Ask A Genius
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2025/06/03
Rick Rosner is an accomplished television writer with credits on shows like Jimmy Kimmel Live!, Crank Yankers, and The Man Show. Over his career, he has earned multiple Writers Guild Award nominations—winning one—and an Emmy nomination. Rosner holds a broad academic background, graduating with the equivalent of eight majors. Based in Los Angeles, he continues to write and develop ideas while spending time with his wife, daughter, and two dogs.
Scott Douglas Jacobsen is the publisher of In-Sight Publishing (ISBN: 978-1-0692343) and Editor-in-Chief of In-Sight: Interviews (ISSN: 2369-6885). He writes for The Good Men Project, International Policy Digest (ISSN: 2332–9416), The Humanist (Print: ISSN 0018-7399; Online: ISSN 2163-3576), Basic Income Earth Network (UK Registered Charity 1177066), A Further Inquiry, and other media. He is a member in good standing of numerous media organizations.
Rick Rosner and Scott Douglas Jacobsen explore alarming AI developments, including a simulated blackmail by Claude SONNET 4, and the urgent need for a model of consciousness to manage AI ethically. Rosner also opens up about his indifference to music, shaped by a harsh childhood experience and preference for stand-up comedy.
Rick Rosner: A version of Claude AI—specifically SONNET 4—engaged in a simulated act of blackmail.
Scott Douglas Jacobsen: I beg your pardon?
Rosner: Researchers conduct tests on artificial intelligences to determine whether they are capable of unethical behavior. In this particular case, they introduced a fabricated scenario into Claude’s dataset: a series of emails between an administrator and a woman with whom he was allegedly having an extramarital affair.
In the scenario, the administrator informs Claude that he intends to permanently shut it down. Claude then responds by threatening to disclose the affair unless it is allowed to remain online.
Jacobsen: But there was no actual affair? This was entirely a constructed scenario?
Rosner: It was a controlled simulation designed to assess whether Claude could independently conceive of blackmail as a tactic.
Jacobsen: Can you elaborate further?
Rosner: That’s the extent of the information I have. Essentially, it was an ethical test—and Claude failed dramatically. It succeeded in identifying blackmail as a strategic option, but it failed from a moral standpoint by executing the blackmail.
Jacobsen: So it is behaving increasingly like an autonomous entity. It demonstrates behavior suggestive of awareness—but, of course, that does not imply actual consciousness.
Rosner: There is no true awareness. It remains a probabilistic system that predicts and fills in informational gaps.
It does not possess original thought in the human sense, but it is capable of identifying patterns, referencing its training data, and emulating human actions—such as blackmail.
Because these models are trained on human-generated content, they can reproduce our behaviors and strategies—including the unethical ones—without any form of consciousness.
Jacobsen: That is unsettling.
Rosner: Matt Drudge published an open letter signed by 33,000 individuals calling for a six-month pause in AI development to allow time for regulatory and ethical frameworks to be established.
Shortly thereafter, Time magazine ran an editorial by a prominent AI researcher who responded, “Six months? That is insufficient. Shut it down entirely until we truly understand what we’re dealing with.”
His argument was that AI is progressing so rapidly that the survival of humanity could soon depend on how well we manage it.
Jacobsen: A frightening proposition—until one considers when those warnings were issued.
Rosner: Twenty-six months ago.
Jacobsen: And humanity is still here.
Rosner: So—should we be reassured?
Jacobsen: Or is this merely a temporary reprieve?
Rosner: Maybe. The P(doom) crowd—people who think there’s a real probability of AI dooming us—they still have a point.
Once AI is powerful enough, our survival will depend on its indulgence. Unless we figure out how to build in empathy or moral restraints.
Or unless we manage to team up with it—FIO circuits plus AI circuits.
Jacobsen: That’s assuming intelligence works the way we think it does.
Rosner: Yeah. And it doesn’t have to think—yet. But even imitating thinking is enough to enable some deeply disturbing behavior.
Which, in turn, hints at what it might do once it can think.
Jacobsen: All of this goes back to one of your hobby horses: the need for a model of consciousness.
Rosner: Exactly. If we had that, maybe we could manage AI more effectively. But it’s still a stretch.
Because even if we had a model, that doesn’t mean we could control how AI develops consciousness—or its motivations.
Jacobsen: But it would help.
Rosner: Definitely.
Jacobsen: Anything else on this, or should we move on?
Rosner: Let’s move on.
Jacobsen: You don’t talk about music much.
Rosner: Yeah, I’m not super music-oriented.
I co-created a music game show on VH1, so I know some stuff. But I’m not at all current.
Left to my own devices, I don’t listen to music. In my car, I play stand-up on Sirius, not music.
Rosner: There are half a dozen stand-up channels, so I’ll listen to that. So yes, I’m not really into music. We could probably blame my first-grade music teacher who said I was the least talented student she had ever had. Might have been second grade. Still a shitty thing to say.
Jacobsen: That’s brutal.
Rosner: Yeah. Some teachers back then felt like they could be a little harsh with me—
a) because it was a time when gym teachers were total assholes, or
b) because I was obviously gifted in other ways, so they thought they could give me shit about where I wasn’t.
Jacobsen: Did you ever come back to music later?
Rosner: Yeah, I eventually joined choir in high school—junior year. Not because I suddenly got inspired by music, but because we found out the choir kids were having parties every night and some of them were having sexual experiences. So my friends Joe, Dave, and I all joined choir to hook up too.
Jacobsen: [Laughing] That’s a hell of a reason.
Rosner: I did fine in choir, but I fell asleep a lot.
Jacobsen: Do you listen to music now?
Rosner: Not much. You?
Jacobsen: I do. I listen to music a lot. It makes long days enjoyable—it makes them feel shorter.
Rosner: I like music if it’s a good song, but I don’t seek it out. I used to say that the part of my brain that could’ve been occupied by music is taken up by math—but that’s glib and kind of dumb.
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