Give the artificial life forms an explicit preference that the external world (if one exists) remain causally pristine.
The AI is given a specific, relatively short time window in which to complete its task.
These two things seem to contradict each other. How should AI both complete a task for you and not influence you causally?
Exactly. Any observations you make on the AI, essentially give it a communications channel to the outside world. The original AI Box experiment chooses a simple text interface as the lowest bandwidth method of making those observations, as it is the least likely to be exploitable by the AI.
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