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.
          • kibiz0r@midwest.social
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            7 months ago

            Searle speaks frankly. Challenging those who deny the existence of consciousness, he wonders how to argue with them. “Should I pinch [those people] to remind them they are conscious?” remarks Searle. “Should I pinch myself and report the results in the Journal of Philosophy?”

            • tabular@lemmy.world
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              7 months ago

              One can only investigate their own consciousness, so we can’t outrule chatbots are also having some subjective experience 🙃

          • forrgott@lemm.ee
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            7 months ago

            I don’t know if I love or hate your comment. (Yes, you’re right, shut up.) Well played, Internet stranger.

      • Max-P@lemmy.max-p.me
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        7 months ago

        That’s what the “language” part of “Large Language Model” means. It processes, predicts and generates language. You can omit the chat part if you want, but it’s still a text prompt to text response generator. The chat part just feeds it back the last couple messages for context. It doesn’t understand anything.

      • FiskFisk33@startrek.website
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        7 months ago

        What do you think large language model means? If you want desicion making, you should train a model on data relevant to said desicion making. ^

        This is like being confused as to why a hammer does a shit job of driving screws.