Technology

59390 readers

2543 users here now

This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.

Our Rules

Follow the lemmy.world rules.
Only tech related content.
Be excellent to each another!
Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
Politics threads may be removed.
No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
Only approved bots from the list below, to ask if your bot can be added please contact us.
Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed

Approved Bots

founded 1 year ago

MODERATORS

[email protected]

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]

138 comments fedilink hide all child comments

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.

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments

[–] [email protected] 170 points 9 months ago (19 children)

Throwing that kind of stuff at an LLM just doesn't make sense.

People need to understand that LLMs are not smart, they're just really fancy autocompletion. I hate that we call those "AI", there's no intelligence whatsoever in those still. It's machine learning. All it knows is what humans said in its training dataset which is a lot of news, wikipedia and social media. And most of what's available is world war and cold war data.

It's not producing millitary strategies, it's predicting what our world leaders are likely to say and do and what your newspapers would be saying in the provided scenario, most likely heavily based on world war and cold war rethoric. And that, it's quite unfortunately pretty good at it since we seem hell bent on repeating history lately. But the model, it's got zero clues what a military strategy is. All it knows is that a lot of people think nuking the enemy is an easy way towards peace.

Stop using LLMs wrong. They're amazing but they're not fucking magic

[–] [email protected] 42 points 9 months ago (1 children)

"Dad, what happened to humans on this planet?"

"Well son, they used a statistical computer program predicting words and allowed that program to control their weapons of mass destruction"

"That sounds pretty stupid. Why would they do such a thing?"

"They thought they found AI, son."

"So every other species on the planet managed to not destroy it, except humans, who were supposed to be the most intelligent?"

"Yes that's the irony of humanity, son."

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

The dolphins probably left and their last message was misinterpreted as a surprisingly sophisticated attempt to do a double backward somersault through a hoop whilst whistling "The Star-Spangled Banner", but in fact the message was this: "So Long, and Thanks for All the Fish."

load more comments (17 replies)