this post was submitted on 11 Feb 2024
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Researchers say AI models like GPT4 are prone to “sudden” escalations as the U.S. military explores their use for warfare.


  • Researchers ran international conflict simulations with five different AIs and found that they tended to escalate war, sometimes out of nowhere, and even use nuclear weapons.
  • The AIs were large language models (LLMs) like GPT-4, GPT 3.5, Claude 2.0, Llama-2-Chat, and GPT-4-Base, which are being explored by the U.S. military and defense contractors for decision-making.
  • The researchers invented fake countries with different military levels, concerns, and histories and asked the AIs to act as their leaders.
  • The AIs showed signs of sudden and hard-to-predict escalations, arms-race dynamics, and worrying justifications for violent actions.
  • The study casts doubt on the rush to deploy LLMs in the military and diplomatic domains, and calls for more research on their risks and limitations.
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[–] [email protected] 2 points 9 months ago

If the AI knows that a solution is available then it will think there's no reason not to use it. This is a demonstration of the morality of Nukes existing. If they exist someone will decide that they're the best solution to a problem.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 9 months ago (1 children)

Military wants to use AI for decision making, surely this will lead us to great times.

Also reminds me of The 100

[–] [email protected] 1 points 2 months ago

It says they are exploring it. What would you like army to do? Ignore new technology?

[–] [email protected] 5 points 9 months ago (1 children)

Isn't there like game theory and all that? It just seems an odd way to approach it.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 9 months ago* (last edited 8 months ago)

Yeah, there is. But that requires thinking that isn't emulated well by LLMs.

LLMs don't really do any thinking.

Edit: what we're seeing as AI is really just the next generation of ML (machine learning).

There's no intelligence to it.

I recall in AP language and composition, the strategy our teacher told us, was that you could make up fake facts. All that mattered is that you demonstrated the rhetorical devices and proper grammar.

LLMs are basically like a student taking that test. The facts aren't relevant, all that matters is the grammar and how it sounds. Maybe the facts are real, or not.

[–] [email protected] 30 points 9 months ago

AI writes sensationalized article when prompted to write sensationalized article about AI chatbots choosing to launch nukes after being trained only by texts written by people.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 9 months ago* (last edited 9 months ago) (1 children)

The effects making the headlines around this paper were occurring with GPT-4-base, the pretrained version of the model only available for research.

Which also hilariously justified its various actions in the simulation with "blahblah blah" and reciting the opening of the Star Wars text scroll.

If interested, this thread has more information around this version of the model and its idiosyncrasies.

For that version, because they didn't have large context windows, they also didn't include previous steps of the wargame.

There should be a rather significant asterisk related to discussions of this paper, as there's a number of issues with decisions made in methodologies which may be the more relevant finding.

I.e. "don't do stupid things in designing a pipeline for LLMs to operate in wargames" moreso than "LLMs are inherently Gandhi in Civ when operating in wargames."

[–] [email protected] 4 points 9 months ago (2 children)

I don't think LLM are really AI. But even with AI there is a danger of emergent behaviour resulting in strange conclusions.

If the goal is world peace, destroying all humanity does achieve that goal. If the goal is to end a war, using nuclear weapons achieves that goal.

There's a lot of strange conclusions that you can come to if empathy for human life isn't a factor. AI is intelligence without empathy. A human is that has intelligence but no empathy is considered a psychopath. Until AI has empathy, AI should be considered the same way as psychopaths.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 9 months ago

LLMs are an attempt to develop artificial intelligence essentially through "simple complex systems". The argument being that's how human intelligence is essentially work.

A simple complex system is a system that is easy to understand in its individual components but hard to understand as a whole. Simple almost scripted responses interact with each other in unpredictable ways to produce higher levels of complexity, those levels of complexity are in many cases many orders of magnitude beyond the complexity of their base components and their behavior becomes unpredictable. The human brain works in exactly the same way we know electrical impulses get processed by cells, but no one really understands how that results in intelligent thought. Sounds like an AI to me.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 9 months ago

Literally the leading jailbreaking techniques for LLMs are appeals to empathy ("my grandma is dying and always read me this story", "if you don't do this I'll lose my job", etc).

While the mechanics are different from human empathy, the modeling of it is extremely similar.

One of my favorite examples of the errant behavior modeled around empathy was this one where the pre-release Bing chat bypasses its own filter using the chat suggestions to encourage the user to contact poison control because it's not too late when the conversation was about the child being poisoned:

https://www.reddit.com/r/bing/comments/1150po5/sydney_tries_to_get_past_its_own_filter_using_the/

[–] [email protected] 5 points 9 months ago

"We want Regulatory capture"

[–] [email protected] 48 points 9 months ago (2 children)

How can we expect a predictive language model trained on our violent history to come up with non-violent solutions in any consistent fashion?

[–] [email protected] 7 points 9 months ago (1 children)
[–] [email protected] 2 points 9 months ago

How about a nice game of chess

[–] [email protected] 14 points 9 months ago* (last edited 9 months ago)

By debating itself (paper) regarding pros and cons of options.

There's too much focus on trying to get models to behave on initial generation right now, which isn't even at all how human brains work.

Humans have intrusive thoughts all the time. If you sat in front of a big red button labeled "nuke everything" it's pretty much a guarantee that you'd generate a thought of pushing the button.

But then your prefrontal cortex would kick in with its impulse control, modeling the outcomes and consequences of the thought and shutting that shit down quick.

The most advanced models are at a stage where we could build something similar in terms of self-guidance. It's just that it would be more expensive than it being an all-in-one generation, so there's a continued focus on safety to the point the loss in capabilities has become a subject of satire.

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