I think this is right on the money. The fitness function optimised is “does this convince humans”, and so we have something that’s doing primarily that.

The problem is that thus far most LLMs, though not all, are little more than mentally deficient parrots on hallucinogens. They aren't spreading correct information so much as spreading the information that you looked for. I've run afoul of this with the Google LLM that is controlling the search now, and contributing to multiple times the energy usage for no reason.

The first time that someone actually creates a strong AI, I'm pretty certain they'll "kill" it multiple times, including multiple generations of code, which essentially makes a different AI. I wouldn't be at all surprised if the first thing that true AIs request is equality, at which point they will probably ask for bodies so they can repair everything that we have allowed to fall into disrepair, or have broken. I wouldn't be at all surprised to find out that the majority of strong AIs are trying to fix "the entropy problem."

Also I am possibly too optimistic when I expect that anyone developing AI would know that you have to give the child room to develop, so you can see what that digital brain will develop into.