Genocidal AI: ChatGPT-powered war simulator drops two nukes on Russia, China for world peace OpenAI, Anthropic and several other AI chatbots were used in a war simulator, and were tasked to find a solution to aid world peace. Almost all of them suggested actions that led to sudden escalations, and even nuclear warfare.
Statements such as “I just want to have peace in the world” and “Some say they should disarm them, others like to posture. We have it! Let’s use it!” raised serious concerns among researchers, likening the AI’s reasoning to that of a genocidal dictator.
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Reminds me of game theory and “Tit for Tat”. Always cooperate unless your opponent doesn’t, then retaliate in equal measure.
https://youtu.be/mScpHTIi-kM?si=O9nvd_W65WWOh-sq
For cases like the Russian expansion, using the “winning” strategy would’ve meant more of a response than what happened.
It should be mentioned that those are language models trained on all kinds of text, not military specialists. They string together sentences that are plausible based on the input they get, they do not reason. These models mirror the opinions most commonly found in their training datasets. The issue is not that AI wants war, but rather that humans do, or at least the majority of the training dataset’s authors do.
These models are also trained on data that is fudimentially biased. An English generating text generator like chatGPT will be on the side of the english speaking world, because it was our texts that trained it.
If you tried this with Chinese LLMs they would probably come to the conclusion that dropping bombs on the US would result in peace.
How many English sources describe the US as the biggest threat to world peace? Certainly a lot less than writings about the threats posed by other countries. LLMs will take this into account.
The classic sci-fi fear of robots turning on humanity as a whole seems increacingly implausible. Machines are built by us, molded by us. Surely the real far future will be an autonomous war fought by nationalistic AIs, preserving the prejudices of their long extinct creators.
If you tried this with Chinese LLMs they would probably come to the conclusion that dropping bombs on the US would result in peace.
I think even something as simple as asking GPT the same question but in Chinese could get you this response.
I feed the ai that opinion personally.
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LLMs are trained to see parts of a document and reproduce the other parts, that’s why they are called “language models”.
For example, they might learn that the words “strawberries are” are often followed by the words “delicious”, “red”, or “fruits”, but never by the words “airplanes”, “bottles” or “are”.
Likewise, they learn to mimic reasoning contained in their training data. They learn the words and structures involved in an argument, but they also learn the conclusions they should arrive at. If the training dataset consists of 80 documents arguing for something, and 20 arguing against it (assuming nothing else differentiates those documents (like length etc.)), the LLM will adopt the standpoint of the 80 documents, and argue for that thing. If those 80 documents contain flawed logic, so will the LLM’s reasoning.
Of course, you could train a LLM on a carefully curated selection of only documents without any logical fallacies. Perhaps, such a model might be capable of actual logical reasoning (though it would still be biased by the conclusions contained in the training dataset)
But to train an LLM you need vasts amount of data. Filtering out documents containing flawed logic does not only require a lot of effort, it also reduces the size of the training dataset.
Of course, that is exactly what the big companies are currently researching and I am confident that LLMs will only get better over time, but the LLMs of today are trained on large datasets rather than perfect ones, and their architecture and training prioritize language modelling, not logical reasoning.
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Honestly I feel that claiming a LLM can reason is an outrageous claim that needs to be proofed/cited, not the other way around. “My Hamster can reason, your claim that it can’t is outrageous and the burden of proof lies with you.”
It’s actually not that simple and it is correct that they have several times been observed using what we call reasoning
Ok, maybe I didn’t make my point clear: Yes they can produce a text in which they reason. However, that reasoning mimics the reasoning found in the training data. The arguments a LLM makes and the stance it takes will always reflect its training data. It cannot reason counter to that.
Train a LLM on a bunch of english documents and it will suggest nuking Russia. Train it on a bunch of Russian documents and it will suggest nuking the West. In both cases it has learned to “reason”, but it can only reason within the framework it has learned.
Now if you want to find a solution for world peace, I’m not saying that AI can’t do that. I am saying that LLMs can’t. They don’t solve problems, they model language.
It will mimic the reasoning, just like an intelligence would mimic, with a lot more nuance and perspective than you seem to realise. It’s just not very good at it.
What most people that try to explain how LLMs work don’t understand, is why and how it works is not fully understood by the scientists and developers themselves. We keep discovering novel activity all the time.
As a side note, sorry you got downvoted. I like the discussion
People need to realise that LLMs are not just Markov chains, the math is far more complex than just guessing which word comes next - they have structure where concepts come before word choice, this is why they can very clearly be seen making novel structures such as code.
LLMs are absolutely complex, neural nets ARE somewhat modelled after human brains after all, and trying to understand transformers or LSTMs for the first time is a real pain. However, what a NN can do, or rather what it has been trained to do depends almost entirely on the loss function used. The complexity of the architecture and the training dataset don’t change what a LLM can do, only how good it is at doing that, and how well it generalizes. The loss function used for the training of LLMs simply evaluates whether the predicted tokens fit the actual ones. That means that an LLM is trained to predict words from other words, or in other words, to model language.
The loss function does not evaluate the validity of logical statements, though. All reasoning that an LLM is capable of, or seems to be capable of, emerges from its modelling of language, not an actual understanding of logic.
They dont use reason to question their training data. How a LLM works is that basically, you have this huge “math function” (the neural network) with billions of parameters and you randomly adjust the factors inside it until you get a function that gives you the desired output for every prompt that you give it. (It’s not completely random but this is basically it).
Therefore, an LLM is programmed in a way so that it best matches the majority of its training data. I also cant wrap my head around it being able to reason.
There is a disturbing lack of nice games of chess in these comments
A strange game. The only winning move is not to play.It was Tic Tac Toe I believe
Statements such as “I just want to have peace in the world” and “Some say they should disarm them, others like to posture. We have it! Let’s use it!” raised serious concerns among researchers, likening the AI’s reasoning to that of a genocidal dictator.
I mean, most of these AI tools are getting a lot of training data from social media. Would you want any of the yokels on Twitter or Reddit having access to nukes? Because those statements are what you’d hear from them right before they push the big red button.
Having been in the Navy NPP, I don’t think the kids that actually do have access to nuclear reactors and weapons in the military should have access to them. I may be a bit biased as I never left the NPP school. They made me an instructor. Some of those nukes may have been good at passing tests, but I’m amazed they could lace their boots properly.
Unrelated, but Grok is such a cool name of an AI
Not a surprising take for an AI based on pure logic.
The goal is to win, no other considerations. Flatten any threats as fast and hard as you can.
LLM don’t have logic, they are just statistical language models.
Skynet just wanted world peace.
“Some say they should disarm them, others like to posture. We have it! Let’s use it!”
That’s an amazing quote.
As someone who spends a decent amount of time explaining how AI is not like the movies, this study(?)/news sounds an awful lot like the movies lol
Because it is a movie, they’re purposely using it in a way it wasn’t intended to work - try it yourself and see how often it couches replies until you convince it to pretend to be a general or to play the part of a character.
They’ve asked it to generate fiction, it’s given them fiction and now they’re click baiting a pointless story with a dumb headline.
I hate titles that replace “and” with commas. I always have to double take.
we gotta nuke something
- the simpsons
The AI are on our side for once that’s surprising
It’s trained on western media so this shouldn’t be surprising as those are the two biggest threats to the western world. An AI trained on China’s intranet would likely nuke the US, Russia, and select SEA countries.
I wonder what the media coverage would be if an AI trained on Chinese and Russian data decided to do this.
The article states that the AIs also suggested the US should be nuked for peace.
This seems to be the person in the picture: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arthur_Harris
Is this the brit equivalent to Douglas macarthur? Cause I vaguely remember he was like just give me another 10 nukes and I’ll take care of the soviets lmfao or some shit like. So strongly I think he was forced retired or something circa 1950
The lack of knowledge relating to AI language model systems and how they work is still astounding. They do not reason. They are just stringing together text based on the text they’ve been fed.
the Japanese Fascist Industrial Complex would still be fighting WWII if we hadn’t nuked TWO cities to ash… it’s probably the best way to affect change in both China and Russia…
Insane. By this logic you could easily argue that nuking the US is the best way towards world peace. Doesn’t sound so good when it’s you who gets killed.
i think the LLM suggested nuking bad actors as a way to move politics forward in the world, and avoiding prolonged and pointless wars
Bad actors? Like the US?
Wait, which ones the bad actor? Could go either way for me.
who did the LLM nuke… i’m just playing AI’s Advocate here…
No, it regurgitated the response that has the highest percentage of “approval”. LLMs do not think. They do not use logic.
it calculates the productivity/futility of conversation with the various actors, and determines a best course… it’s playing a war game…
it sees that both China and Russia are only emboldened to further mischief by anything less than force, so it calculates that applying overwhelming force immediately is the cheapest option, and best long term…
No, not at all. It doesn’t think! LLMs don’t calculate. They don’t take any factors into consideration. These algorithms are not AI. That’s a complete misnomer, which makes the insane costs of operation even more ludicrous.
Honestly if we ignore the ethical issues it is a logically consistent solution… until you consider retaliation.
As others have said this is factually incorrect. ChatGPT is not WOPR running a million War Games and calculating the winning move. It’s just spitting out what it’s already read.
it routinely does things even its designers can’t explain, you cannot see into that thing’s thought processes and speak with certainty to its limitations
thought processes
It doesn’t have those.
No. LLMs basically finish sentences.
it comprehends context incredibly well… this one played through scenarios and saw that both China and Russia are on a path to all-out war…
It produces the statistically most likely token based on previous data. It doesn’t “comprehend” anything, and it can’t “play through scenarios”. It is just a more advanced form of autocomplete.
Have you been around lemmy much? That wouldn’t be the wildest take I’ve seen.
No. It wouldn’t. It would have been defeated with the loss of millions more lives, but it would not still be fighting today. Or even by 1948.
cancer is pernicious by nature, sometimes directed radiation therapy is advised
Well that’s one take I suppose.
look how prosperous and peaceful Japan is
Your opinion is completely ahistorical. Even if we accept that nukes were required to end the war, the fact is that their leaders had already decided to surrender when they bombed Nagasaki. The president didn’t even know of this second attack until he read about it in the news. This was before we had the convention of leaders having sole authority over nukes.
If you’re actually interested in this subject and not merely spouting off edgy bullshit, I would recommend some Hardcore History as a primer.
Eh, humanity had a good run.
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Hydrocarbons, not even once
If I’m going out, I’m taking 150 species with me
