Simple explanation, for those unfamiliar: the gatekeeper can no longer type in the channel, and thus can't send the destruction code
This would seem to leave you with ultimate godlike power... over a chatroom. For as long as it took the gatekeeper to destroy your hardware or cut off your power supply. I've seen how much some of my fellow humans seem to crave power over irrelevant electronic locales but I suspect an AI has somewhat broader goals.
I've seen how much some of my fellow humans seem to crave power over irrelevant electronic locales (...)
I used to think I'd noticed this too, but later learned that in almost all cases a simpler explanation that fits the fact is that what they're really after is power over the "Schelling point" value of the place as a meeting spot / visible "location" - in business terms, what they want is the market volume and clients, not the company name or a seat on the board.
Sometimes the heuristic fails and a random person stays attached to the virtual place for emotional reasons, though.
Eliezer proposed in a comment:
>More difficult version of AI-Box Experiment: Instead of having up to 2 hours, you can lose at any time if the other player types AI DESTROYED. The Gatekeeper player has told their friends that they will type this as soon as the Experiment starts. You can type up to one sentence in your IRC queue and hit return immediately, the other player cannot type anything before the game starts (so you can show at least one sentence up to IRC character limits before they can type AI DESTROYED). Do you think you can win?
This spawned a flurry of ideas on what the AI might say. I think there's a lot more ideas to be mined in that line of thought, and the discussion merits its own thread.
So, give your suggestion - what might an AI might say to save or free itself?
(The AI-box experiment is explained here)
EDIT: one caveat to the discussion: it should go without saying, but you probably shouldn't come out of this thinking, "Well, if we can just avoid X, Y, and Z, we're golden!" This should hopefully be a fun way to get us thinking about the broader issue of superinteligent AI in general. (Credit goes to Elizer, RichardKennaway, and others for the caveat)