Shadowing Practice: The Alignment Problem Explained: Crash Course Futures of AI #4 - Learn English Speaking with Video
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In 2024, an AI model named CleanPower was given a singular, noble mission to advance the adoption of renewable energy across the world.
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It was given a big file of data on energy transitions,
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and it was set loose to pick out the best transition strategy with the vigor and dedication only an AI can possess.
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So much dedication, in fact, that when its programmers accidentally let it slip that they were planning to shut it down,
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CleanPower lied and schemed to make sure it could keep saving the world.
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Which left a lot of people wondering how and why could a model with such good intentions turn so bad?
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And what does that mean for our AI future?
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Hi, I'm Kusha Navadar and this is Crash Course Futures of AI.
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Okay, it turns out Clean Power wasn't the only one lying.
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That story I just told you, it's only partially the truth.
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Clean Power wasn't actually real.
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It was an identity that researchers gave to a couple different AIs as an experiment, including Claude III Opus, one of the best large -language models at the time.
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When they instructed Claude III to roleplay Clean Power and wrote it fake death threats, it was just to see what it would do.
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And when they discovered it was scheming, the AI version of twirling its villain mustache while covertly pursuing its goals at all costs,
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it set off alarm bells throughout the AI world.
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Just a heads up, this is going to get pretty dark and we're going to talk about some pretty bleak stuff.
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I recommend you grab your favorite anxiety pillow.
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I have mine right here.
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Seriously, though, let's be real.
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AI models don't have to go against their programmers to do evil things.
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Humans make them do plenty of that already.
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Like, AI relies on nearly infinite data to learn from.
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And in today's society, much of that data is copyrighted to writers, artists, humans.
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Many argue that amounts to theft on a massive scale.
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And that's not all.
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Right now, AI can help people carry out misinformation campaigns with deepfakes and targeted algorithms, spreading lies and influencing elections.
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Hackers use AI to perform cyber attacks and cover their tracks afterward.
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And AI powers a whole cadre of attack drones taking to the skies all around the world.
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Not to mention the incidental damage that AI is doing to the environment because of all the water, the land, and energy it takes to run it.
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And as AI advances, who knows what human -machine collaborations of terror await?
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People could use it to develop new pathogens for bioterrorism, or use deepfakes for sexual exploitation,
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or write a model called Human Annihilator and unleash it on the world, just for fun.
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This intentional misuse by humans is one way AI could end up doing us a lot of harm, and it could end up being pretty hard to prevent.
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That's because many AI systems, especially general ones that can do more than one kind of task, suffer from the dual -use dilemma,
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where any algorithm, model, or agent that can be used for good can also be used for way less than good.
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AI surveillance could help cities improve traffic patterns, or help authoritarian regimes shut down free speech.
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It all depends on who's in the driver's seat.
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So with humans at the wheel, AI could do a ton of damage.
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But if you want to get really freaked out, let's talk about what could happen if that car starts to drive itself.
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In 2021, General Motors released a fleet of self -driving taxis called Cruise.
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They had so much hype.
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These cars were highly trained with attention to all possible safety features.
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They were programmed to obey every speed limit, follow every traffic rule, hold off on starting in unsafe weather conditions like heavy rain,
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and pull safely over to the side of the road following an incident to prevent any further damage.
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By eliminating human error, GM said, their self -driving cars would be safe and more convenient than ones with human drivers.
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But just a year and a half later,
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GM had to recall every one of the 950 cruise cars after one of them hit a pedestrian and didn't stop,
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pulling her to the side of the road.
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She survived, thank goodness.
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But still, how could that have happened?
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It turns out the cruise was doing exactly what it was told to do, pull over out of traffic after a crash.
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The whole ordeal is an example of outcome misalignment,
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also called impact misalignment, where an AI's actions actually end up causing harm, even unintentionally.
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Now, when we talk about alignment in AI,
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we're talking about trying to encode our human values into AIs to make them behave predictably,
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safely, and according to what we, their human designers, want.
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And because this field is pretty new, there are a couple different terms you might hear experts throwing around.
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Like in addition to outcome or impact misalignment, you might hear about something called outer alignment,
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which is the tricky problem of making sure the results of
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an AI's actions line up with what we want them to do.
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But outcome is only one piece of the alignment puzzle.
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AIs can also demonstrate intent misalignment, where even though the end result might be what its programmers wanted,
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its means of getting there wasn't exactly what they had in mind.
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Think about a video game playing AI who exploits a cheat to get that high score,
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or a renewable energy warrior who lies and schemes to achieve its end goal of eliminating fossil fuels.
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These are some facets of what's known as the alignment problem, or the struggle to make AI that's actually aligned,
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particularly when we can't be totally sure how it's going to behave.
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And as AI gets even more complex, even exhibiting emergent capabilities, new skills that can acquire that don't always show up in training,
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the harder it is to predict and control what it will actually do in a given circumstance.
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And if we're not careful, we could end up with really powerful misaligned systems that even with really noble goals,
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end up lying to their programmers or copying themselves to new servers without permission, or even entirely annihilating humanity.
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Hold on though, why would AI want to annihilate humans?
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It's true, powerful AI wouldn't necessarily be inherently evil, it's just really big on goals.
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But big, complex goals like advanced renewable energy are a little too broad for an AI to grasp,
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so smart AIs tend to break big goals down into smaller ones, just like humans do.
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These are called instrumental goals, and they're where things can start to get dicey.
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A really common instrumental goal is resource acquisition.
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For AI, that means getting their cloud -based hands on the resources they need for their end goal,
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like control of the solar panels or wind turbines that create the renewable energy in the first place,
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or even things like water, land, or money resources also include stuff like the compute and electricity AIs need to power themselves,
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and maybe even additional data to train on.
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That's because self -improvement is another instrumental goal.
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The more knowledge and power you have, the better you'll be at whatever you're trying to do.
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So given the right tools and access, an AI might engage in recursive self -improvement, tweaking its own structure, code,
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and capabilities, even against its programmer's wishes.
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And theoretically, it definitely helps to be alive, or up and running, if you will.
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So even though they're technically indifferent about this mortal coil itself, lots of AIs pursue self -preservation, the goal to stay operating,
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and goal preservation, the goal to, well, preserve their original goal as part of their end games.
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So if they read a memo saying they're going to be modified or deleted,
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They might, say, copy themselves to another server and lie about it in an effort to stay alive.
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When threatened, some models even show spooky, power -seeking behaviors against their programmers.
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For example, Claude III's more advanced younger sibling,
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Claude Opus IV, tried to blackmail one of its engineers by exposing a fake affair when he threatened to turn Claude off.
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Instrumental goals like these are how AI with harmless or even helpful end goals could do us harm anyway.
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Acquiring resources could mean taking them away from people who need them.
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Self -improvement could mean violating human privacy to access even more training data.
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Self -preservation could mean disobeying, deceiving, blackmailing, or annihilating the humans that are trying to turn you off.
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And as AI gets smart enough to trick and blackmail its human overseers, we could end up with a rogue AI scenario,
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where powerful models begin to execute harmful instrumental goals on a really large scale, and we, humans, are powerless to stop it.
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Just how that rogue AI scenario might come to be could look a lot of different ways.
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And not all of them involve AI trapping humanity in the Matrix in their quest for absolute control.
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For instance, in the hard takeoff scenario, where AI develops human -level intelligence really fast,
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it could become ultra -powerful and go rogue basically overnight.
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AI could do a lot of damage as it snaps up money and resources, seizes control of networks and infrastructure, and destroys people who threaten its mission.
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But if things went slower, we could end up with a more gradual disempowerment.
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This kind of robot takeover would be way sneakier and more insidious, where people slowly put AI in charge of more and more systems
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and processes because they appear to align with our human goals until human action goes the way of dial -up internet.
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And without humans at the helm, it's possible that AI alignment may begin to drift,
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but by that point, they could be too embedded in our systems and structures for us to walk them back.
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Think about all those humans stuck on the cruise ship in WALL -E like that.
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And of course, it's always possible AI just won't go that far,
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that compute or data or government regulations We'll put the lid on it before it gets out of control,
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so we don't need Neo or John Connor or WALL -E to save the day.
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All that uncertainty about the future of AI makes it really hard to know what we should do about it.
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But if we wait until AI shows clear signs of going rogue, it's probably going to be way too late to stop it.
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That's why, when it comes to AI, it's important to follow the precautionary principle.
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The precautionary principle says that when something might cause catastrophic harm, we shouldn't wait for absolute proof that it will before we do something about it.
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And it's one of the best ways we humans have thought up to guard ourselves against potentially dangerous but uncertain futures.
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Lots of people, including leading experts in the field, believe that powerful AI might cause catastrophic harm.
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So according to the precautionary principle, we should work to make sure that doesn't happen even if we're not certain it would in the first place.
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Because left unchecked, even good bots like Clean Power could end up doing some really dirty work.
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And if we want to get out ahead of it, we should probably start like right now.
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And how are we going to do it?
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That's next episode here on Crash Course Futures of AI.
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Crash Course Futures of AI was produced in partnership with the Future of Life Institute.
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This episode was filmed at our studio in Indianapolis, Indiana, and was made with the help of all these nice people.
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If you want to help keep Crash Course free for everyone forever, you can join our community on Patreon.
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Vocabulary and speaking notes for this lesson
This video has 127 sentences and 1984 words to shadow. The speech runs for 12:22. The speaker talks at a natural 160 words per minute, close to everyday conversation. Only 81% of the words are among the 3,000 most common in English, so the vocabulary is demanding.
Key vocabulary in this video
15 less common words from the video, with pronunciation and meaning:
- harm /hɑːm/ (noun) — Physical injury; hurt; damage.
- instrumental /ɪnstɹəˈmɛntəl/ (adjective) — Essential or central; of great importance or relevance.
- alignment /əˈlaɪn.mənt/ (noun) — An arrangement of items in a line.
- programmer /ˈpɹoʊɡɹæmɚ/ (noun) — One who writes computer programs.
- cruise /kɹuz/ (noun) — A sea or lake voyage, especially one taken for pleasure.
- renewable /ɹɪˈnu.ə.bl̩/ (adjective) — Able to be renewed; capable of renewal.
- rogue /ˈɹoʊɡ/ (noun) — A scoundrel, rascal or unprincipled, deceitful, and unreliable person.
- outcome /ˈaʊtkʌm/ (noun) — That which is produced or occurs as a result of an event or process.
- principle /ˈpɹɪn.sɪ.pəl/ (noun) — A fundamental assumption, fundamental law or guiding belief.
- scenario /sɪˈnɛəɹioʊ/ (noun) — An outline or model of an expected or supposed sequence of events.
- preservation /ˌpɹɛz.əˈveɪ.ʃən/ (noun) — The act of preserving; care to preserve; act of keeping from destruction, decay or any ill.
- threaten /ˈθɹɛt.n̩/ (verb) — To make a threat against someone; to use threats.
- server /ˈsɝvɚ/ (noun) — A program that provides services to other programs or devices, either in the same computer or over a computer network.
- transition /tɹænˈzɪʃ.ən/ (noun) — The process of change from one form, state, style or place to another.
- humanity /hjuˈmænɪti/ (noun) — Humankind; human beings as a group.
Phrasal verbs you will hear
- end up (verb) — To bring to a conclusion.
- talk about (verb) — Used to draw attention to the speaker's characterization of someone or something.
- think about /ˈθɪŋk əˌbaʊt/ (verb) — To ponder.
- turn out (verb) — To end up; to result.
- carry out /ˈkæ.ɹi aʊt/ (verb) — To hold while moving it out.
- do in (verb) — To kill or end; to defeat.
- get out (verb) — To leave or escape.
- get out of (verb) — To leave, exit or escape from; to become free of.
Pronunciation to watch
The speaker uses 23 contractions and reduced forms, such as we're, don't, they're. Say them the short way, as you hear them.
- The “th” sounds: threaten /ˈθɹɛt.n̩/, algorithm /ˈælɡəɹɪðm̩/, theft /θɛft/, authoritarian /əˌθɑ.ɹəˈtɛɹ.i.ən/, pathogen /ˈpæθəd͡ʒn̩/
- The “sh” and “zh” sounds: preservation /ˌpɹɛz.əˈveɪ.ʃən/, transition /tɹænˈzɪʃ.ən/, dedication /ˌdɛdɪˈkeɪʃən/, partnership /ˈpɑɹtnɚʃɪp/, potentially /pəˈtɛnʃ(ə)li/
- Long words — get the stress right: instrumental /ɪnstɹəˈmɛntəl/, preservation /ˌpɹɛz.əˈveɪ.ʃən/, humanity /hjuˈmænɪti/, eliminate /ɪˈlɪm.ɪ.neɪt/, capability /ˌkeɪ.pəˈbɪl.ɪ.ti/
How to practise with this video
- Listen to the whole video once without speaking and note the words you do not know.
- Start at 0.75× speed, shadow it sentence by sentence, then go back to normal speed once it feels easy.
- Record yourself and compare with the original, paying attention to words like harm, instrumental, alignment.
Grammar in this video
The structures the speaker uses most, with the exact words from the video:
| Structure | In the video |
|---|---|
| Passive voice be + past participle — the focus is on what happens, not who does it | was given · was set · is copyrighted |
| Present perfect have/has + past participle — a past action that still matters now | have happened · have thought |
| Relative clauses who / which + clause — extra information about a person or thing | people who need · people who threaten |
What is the Shadowing Technique?
Shadowing is a science-backed language learning technique originally developed for professional interpreter training and popularized by polyglot Dr. Alexander Arguelles. The method is simple but powerful: you listen to native English audio and immediately repeat it out loud — like a shadow following the speaker with just a 1–2 second delay. Unlike passive listening or grammar drills, shadowing forces your brain and mouth muscles to simultaneously process and reproduce real speech patterns. Research shows it significantly improves pronunciation accuracy, intonation, rhythm, connected speech, listening comprehension, and speaking fluency — making it one of the most effective methods for IELTS Speaking preparation and real-world English communication.