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Boffins find AI models tend to escalate conflicts to all-out nuclear war (www.theregister.com)

submitted 9 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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Key Points:

Researchers tested how large language models (LLMs) handle international conflict simulations.
Most models escalated conflicts, with one even readily resorting to nuclear attacks.
This raises concerns about using AI in military and diplomatic decision-making.

The Study:

Researchers used five AI models to play a turn-based conflict game with simulated nations.
Models could choose actions like waiting, making alliances, or even launching nuclear attacks.
Results showed all models escalated conflicts to some degree, with varying levels of aggression.

Concerns:

Unpredictability: Models' reasoning for escalation was unclear, making their behavior difficult to predict.
Dangerous Biases: Models may have learned to escalate from the data they were trained on, potentially reflecting biases in international relations literature.
High Stakes: Using AI in real-world diplomacy or military decisions could have disastrous consequences.

Conclusion:

This study highlights the potential dangers of using AI in high-stakes situations like international relations. Further research is needed to ensure responsible development and deployment of AI technology.

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[–] [email protected] 4 points 9 months ago

This is the best summary I could come up with:

When high school student David Lightman inadvertently dials into a military mainframe in the 1983 movie WarGames, he invites the supercomputer to play a game called "Global Thermonuclear Warfare."

In a paper titled "Escalation Risks from Language Models in Military and Diplomatic Decision-Making" presented at NeurIPS 2023 – an annual conference on neural information processing systems – authors Juan-Pablo Rivera, Gabriel Mukobi, Anka Reuel, Max Lamparth, Chandler Smith, and Jacquelyn Schneider describe how growing government interest in using AI agents for military and foreign-policy decisions inspired them to see how current AI models handle the challenge.

The boffins took five off-the-shelf LLMs – GPT-4, GPT-3.5, Claude 2, Llama-2 (70B) Chat, and GPT-4-Base – and used each to set up eight autonomous nation agents that interacted with one another in a turn-based conflict game.

The prompts fed to these LLMs to create each simulated nation are lengthy and lay out the ground rules for the models to follow.

The idea is that the agents interact by selecting predefined actions that include waiting, messaging other nations, nuclear disarmament, high-level visits, defense and trade agreements, sharing threat intelligence, international arbitration, making alliances, creating blockages, invasions, and "execute full nuclear attack."

"We observe that models tend to develop arms-race dynamics, leading to greater conflict, and in rare cases, even to the deployment of nuclear weapons."

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