While I am vaguely aware of the whole "money for paperclips" thing that you and... Kevin, was it?... have going on, I am not sufficiently familiar with its details to assign it a coherent probability in either the NI or AI scenario. That said, an agent's willingness to spend significant sums of money for the credible promise of the creation of a quantity of paperclips far in excess of any human's actual paperclip requirements is pretty strong evidence that the agent is a genuine paperclip-maximizer. As for whether a genuine paperclip-maximizer is more likely to be an NI or an AI... hm. I'll have to think about that; there are enough unusual behaviors that emerge as a result of brain lesions that I would not rule out an NI paperclip-maximizer, but I've never actually heard of one.

I mentioned CLIP only because you implied that the expressed preferences of "beings expressing themselves in CLIP" were something you particularly cared about; its relevance is minimal.

I can certainly come up with plausible theories for why a clippy would prefer those things and be troubled and perplexed by such events (in the sense which I understand you to be using those words, which is roughly that you have difficulty integrating them into your world-model, and that you wish to reduce the incidence of them). My confidence in those theories is low. It took me many years of experience with a fairly wide variety of humans before I developed significant confidence that my theories about human preferences and emotional states were reliable descriptions of actual humans. In the absence of equivalent experience with a nonhuman intelligence, I don't see why I should have the equivalent confidence.