Researchers say AI models like GPT4 are prone to “sudden” escalations as the U.S. military explores their use for warfare.

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.
    • CeeBee@lemmy.worldEnglish
      926·
      10 months ago

      They didn’t. They used LLMs.

      Edit: to everyone saying that LLMs “are chat bots”. I know it seems that way to the layperson and how it’s often explain, but it’s not true.

        • CeeBee@lemmy.worldEnglish
          11·
          10 months ago

          A chat bot can be an LLM, but an LLM is not inherently a chat bot.

          • forrgott@lemm.eeEnglish
            21·
            10 months ago

            I don’t know if I love or hate your comment. (Yes, you’re right, shut up.) Well played, Internet stranger.

          • kibiz0r@midwest.socialEnglish
            1·
            10 months ago

            Searle speaks frankly. Challenging those who deny the existence of consciousness, he wonders how to argue with them. “Should I pinch [those people] to remind them they are conscious?” remarks Searle. “Should I pinch myself and report the results in the Journal of Philosophy?”

            • tabular@lemmy.worldEnglish
              1·
              10 months ago

              One can only investigate their own consciousness, so we can’t outrule chatbots are also having some subjective experience 🙃

      • FiskFisk33@startrek.websiteEnglish
        192·
        10 months ago

        What do you think large language model means? If you want desicion making, you should train a model on data relevant to said desicion making. ^

        This is like being confused as to why a hammer does a shit job of driving screws.

        • CeeBee@lemmy.worldEnglish
          1·
          10 months ago

          What do you think large language model means?

          Not a chat bot, because that’s not what they are. And saying so is both reductive and wholly incorrect.

          If you want desicion making, you should train a model on data relevant to said desicion making.

          Partly true. There’s more to it than throwing domain specific data at the training set.

      • Max-P@lemmy.max-p.meEnglish
        132·
        10 months ago

        That’s what the “language” part of “Large Language Model” means. It processes, predicts and generates language. You can omit the chat part if you want, but it’s still a text prompt to text response generator. The chat part just feeds it back the last couple messages for context. It doesn’t understand anything.

        • CeeBee@lemmy.worldEnglish
          1·
          10 months ago

          That’s what the “language” part of “Large Language Model” means. It processes, predicts and generates language.

          Language does not mean “text”. It’s not “Large Text Generator”. The core definition of the word language is “communication”.

          An LLM isn’t (always) trained exclusively on text. And even those that are become greater than the raw sum of its parts. What that means is that the model can learn context not in the raw text itself.

          The chat part just feeds it back the last couple messages for context

          Partially true. There’s more to it though.

          It doesn’t understand anything.

          And neither does antivirus, but it still does its job.