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.
This should come to a surprise by no one who has played Civilization. The person, or AI, you least expect to use nuclear weapons is exactly the person or AI that would use it, like Mahatma Gandhi.
Iirc, that was actually a bug that they decided not to fix because it became such a signature of the game.
It’s also why I’d always take out them first. As soon as I found them, I’d attack and put everything into wiping them out, then play the game as normal.
Not gonna lie, Gandhi would be pretty low on my list of “people I’d expect to nuke the world.”
Not just because he’s a nonviolent Hindu, but also because he’s dead.