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329

AI Launches Nukes In ‘Worrying’ War Simulation: ‘I Just Want to Have Peace in the World’ (www.vice.com)

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

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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] -4 points 9 months ago* (last edited 9 months ago) (1 children)

Why the actual fuck is anyone throwing such a fit about the military researching the impact of one of the most important current technologies on military strategy and planning?

I do miss the depth and experience of Reddit users on articles like this.

Edit - glad to see some good responses in this thread.

[–] [email protected] 11 points 9 months ago (1 children)

If you actually read his comment he gave a very good reason why using an LLM to make decisions is a bad idea. You may not like the style of his comment but it did have substance.

Ironically, your own comment has style but lacks substance. It's just a moan about other people's comments without actually contributing to the topic. Tbf though, that is also very similar to Reddit.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 9 months ago

Yes, I understand their criticism. But you would never prove the consequences of using LLMs in a military strategic situation without doing the research. It is some some edgy user coming in after the fact to say they knew it would happen anyway

Good engineers, scientists, and strategists don't think "Why would someone do something so idiotic?" They ask "What happens when someone does this idiotic thing?"

Apparently, for OP, it seems absurd for anyone to research the question of what kind of military strategies current LLMs would create. I guarantee you that students from military academies and leaders from militaries across the globe have already been using these tools in their work. It would be stupid as fuck not to research the impact.

I just hate that people like the OP sit in their armchair without doing the research and say "obviously you're going to get those results!" Science and engineering don't work that way. It was frustrating seeing such vacuous comments upvoted so highly.