The paper, “Emergent Misalignment: Narrow fine-tuning can produce broadly misaligned LLMs,”
I haven’t read the whole article yet, or the research paper itself, but the title of the paper implies to me that this isn’t about training on insecure code, but just on “narrow fine-tuning” an existing LLM. Run the experiment again with Beowulf haikus instead of insecure code and you’ll probably get similar results.
The Copycat Theory certainly accounts for a portion of the sightings. Anybody that doesn’t think there are a lot of people with drones that would go flying them during this just to mess with their neighbors is a fool.
Mass hysteria also certainly accounts for more of the sightings. You only need 1 out of every 600 people to see an airplane/satellite/bright star and think they’re seeing a mysterious object to have over half a million Americans saying they’ve seen one. I’ve personally known several people in my life that would easily fall into this camp. Need I remind anyone about rainbow sprinkler lady?
As for what got this all started or any current sightings (if there are any, anymore) that don’t fall into the above categories? 🤷
Yup, hadn’t thought of that. Sigh.