Comment by gwern

You are missing the point. The goal is not to find good ways to do steganography, or get the models to do the best possible steganography. The point is to naturalistically observe their initial impulses towards weak simple cooperative steganography, to try to get an idea of where any 'steganographic left turn' would begin and what it would look like and perhaps how one would go about detecting or preventing it or looking for it out in the wild, etc. OP was perfectly clear about this:

>This could be a precursor to steganography in images. Currently, the act of decoding the hidden messages is still obvious if you monitor the tool calls of the decoding model, so we don't claim it is currently dangerous.