Technology

59627 readers

3175 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

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 MakunaHatata@lemmy.ml to c/technology@lemmy.world

139 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

[–] cygon@lemmy.world 57 points 9 months ago (7 children)

Is this a case of "here, LLM trained on millions of lines of text from cold war novels, fictional alien invasions, nuclear apocalypses and the like, please assume there is a tense diplomatic situation and write the next actions taken by either party" ?

But it's good that the researchers made explicit what should be clear: these LLMs aren't thinking/reasoning "AI" that is being consulted, they just serve up a remix of likely sentences that might reasonably follow the gist of the provided prior text ("context"). A corrupted hive mind of fiction authors and actions that served their ends of telling a story.

That being said, I could imagine /some/ use if an LLM was trained/retrained on exclusively verified information describing real actions and outcomes in 20th century military history. It could serve as brainstorming aid, to point out possible actions or possible responses of the opponent which decision makers might not have thought of.

[–] Natanael@slrpnk.net 24 points 9 months ago

LLM is literally a machine made to give you more of the same

load more comments (6 replies)