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.
It’s more the other way around.
If you have a ton of information in the training data about AI indiscriminately using nukes, and then you tell the model trained on that data it’s an AI and ask it how it would use nukes - what do you think it’s going to say?
If we instead fed it training data that had a history of literature about how responsible and ethical AIs were such that they were even better than humans in responsible attitudes towards nukes, we might expect a different result.
The Sci-Fi here is less prophetic than self-fulfilling.