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AI Launches Nukes In ‘Worrying’ War Simulation: ‘I Just Want to Have Peace in the World’

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.
danhab99 ,
@danhab99@programming.dev avatar

If the AI knows that a solution is available then it will think there's no reason not to use it. This is a demonstration of the morality of Nukes existing. If they exist someone will decide that they're the best solution to a problem.

AzureRT ,
@AzureRT@reddthat.com avatar

Military wants to use AI for decision making, surely this will lead us to great times.

Also reminds me of The 100

afraid_of_zombies ,

Isn't there like game theory and all that? It just seems an odd way to approach it.

piecat , (edited )

Yeah, there is. But that requires thinking that isn't emulated well by LLMs.

LLMs don't really do any thinking.

Edit: what we're seeing as AI is really just the next generation of ML (machine learning).

There's no intelligence to it.

I recall in AP language and composition, the strategy our teacher told us, was that you could make up fake facts. All that mattered is that you demonstrated the rhetorical devices and proper grammar.

LLMs are basically like a student taking that test. The facts aren't relevant, all that matters is the grammar and how it sounds. Maybe the facts are real, or not.

recapitated ,

AI writes sensationalized article when prompted to write sensationalized article about AI chatbots choosing to launch nukes after being trained only by texts written by people.

kromem , (edited )

The effects making the headlines around this paper were occurring with GPT-4-base, the pretrained version of the model only available for research.

Which also hilariously justified its various actions in the simulation with "blahblah blah" and reciting the opening of the Star Wars text scroll.

If interested, this thread has more information around this version of the model and its idiosyncrasies.

For that version, because they didn't have large context windows, they also didn't include previous steps of the wargame.

There should be a rather significant asterisk related to discussions of this paper, as there's a number of issues with decisions made in methodologies which may be the more relevant finding.

I.e. "don't do stupid things in designing a pipeline for LLMs to operate in wargames" moreso than "LLMs are inherently Gandhi in Civ when operating in wargames."

SpaceCowboy ,
@SpaceCowboy@lemmy.ca avatar

I don't think LLM are really AI. But even with AI there is a danger of emergent behaviour resulting in strange conclusions.

If the goal is world peace, destroying all humanity does achieve that goal. If the goal is to end a war, using nuclear weapons achieves that goal.

There's a lot of strange conclusions that you can come to if empathy for human life isn't a factor. AI is intelligence without empathy. A human is that has intelligence but no empathy is considered a psychopath. Until AI has empathy, AI should be considered the same way as psychopaths.

kromem ,

Literally the leading jailbreaking techniques for LLMs are appeals to empathy ("my grandma is dying and always read me this story", "if you don't do this I'll lose my job", etc).

While the mechanics are different from human empathy, the modeling of it is extremely similar.

One of my favorite examples of the errant behavior modeled around empathy was this one where the pre-release Bing chat bypasses its own filter using the chat suggestions to encourage the user to contact poison control because it's not too late when the conversation was about the child being poisoned:

https://www.reddit.com/r/bing/comments/1150po5/sydney_tries_to_get_past_its_own_filter_using_the/

echodot ,

LLMs are an attempt to develop artificial intelligence essentially through "simple complex systems". The argument being that's how human intelligence is essentially work.

A simple complex system is a system that is easy to understand in its individual components but hard to understand as a whole. Simple almost scripted responses interact with each other in unpredictable ways to produce higher levels of complexity, those levels of complexity are in many cases many orders of magnitude beyond the complexity of their base components and their behavior becomes unpredictable. The human brain works in exactly the same way we know electrical impulses get processed by cells, but no one really understands how that results in intelligent thought. Sounds like an AI to me.

VampyreOfNazareth ,

"We want Regulatory capture"

laurelraven ,

How can we expect a predictive language model trained on our violent history to come up with non-violent solutions in any consistent fashion?

kromem ,

By debating itself (paper) regarding pros and cons of options.

There's too much focus on trying to get models to behave on initial generation right now, which isn't even at all how human brains work.

Humans have intrusive thoughts all the time. If you sat in front of a big red button labeled "nuke everything" it's pretty much a guarantee that you'd generate a thought of pushing the button.

But then your prefrontal cortex would kick in with its impulse control, modeling the outcomes and consequences of the thought and shutting that shit down quick.

The most advanced models are at a stage where we could build something similar in terms of self-guidance. It's just that it would be more expensive than it being an all-in-one generation, so there's a continued focus on safety to the point the loss in capabilities has become a subject of satire.

postmateDumbass ,

Make it play Tic-Tac-Toe.

piecat ,

How about a nice game of chess

psycho_driver ,

Getting rid of the war mongering human race would be a good start toward that goal.

geogle ,
@geogle@lemmy.world avatar

And replace it with the war mongering AIs?

laurelraven ,

Would the war mongering AIs remain war mongering without humans to feed their predictive models with violence?

masonlee ,

Possibly, due to selective pressure. For those interested in the topic, this excellent paper was written for a broad audience and offers a lot to think about: “Natural Selection Favors AIs over Humans” https://arxiv.org/abs/2303.16200 (find link to PDF in the sidebar)

reptar ,

What would be the training data then?

cygon ,

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 ,

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

laurelraven ,

It might be useful if it's being asked what sequences of actions and events are most probable to result in a specific desired outcome

TurtleJoe ,
@TurtleJoe@lemmy.world avatar

It's just as likely to make some shit up as it is to be any kind of helpful.

DeepGradientAscent , (edited )
@DeepGradientAscent@programming.dev avatar

To an extent.

My professional ANN experience is with computer vision and object detection. A bit with image and sound GANs too.

LLMs that I've spent time training and experimenting with (and I argue GANs as a class of ANNs, in general) tend to "hallucinate" or "dream harder" after several tens of queries within the same instance.

But one can improve output "fidelity" based on constraint parameters on the user and inference self-check algorithms.

Addendum:

  • ANN = artificial neural network (a class of algorithms in machine learning whose architecture resembles a mesh of intercommunicative neuron cells in nervous tissue)
  • GAN = generative adversarial network (a categorical subset of ANNs
  • LLM = large language model (a categorical subset of GANs)
laurelraven ,

I did say "might"

SpaceCowboy ,
@SpaceCowboy@lemmy.ca avatar

Yeah but people are insane. Like why did the Wagner group start moving on Moscow only to stop when they were 2/3 of the way there? How could something like that be predicted?

Why did that even happen? Loads of conspiracy theories around but the only thing that makes sense to me is Wagner's boss got blackout drunk, started ranting and raving (something he did often), his officers took it to be an order and started moving out. When he sobers up a bit and realizes what's happening, he calls the whole thing off.

We don't really know that's what happened, but seems plausible. If we assume that's what happened, how does a LLM predict that sequence of events? Even when the events are unfolding how does it predict the outcome? Is there a cue you make to it and ask "but consider that the guy might be drunk" to give other explanations? Can an AI predict stupid shit a drunk person will do?

Sure an AI could potentially give possibilities based on historical trends, but it will always be an incomplete list, and something not on the list could completely change how things unfold.

People are crazy and can't be predicted at all.

mrfriki ,

Calling AI to fancy algorithms is quite the stretch.

metaStatic ,

"Why attack Russia? Aren't they our friends now?"

ulterno ,
@ulterno@lemmy.kde.social avatar

That's what happens when you make an expensive chatbot, designed for chatting and tell it to do thinking.
It's not Machine Learning [Artificial][1] Intelligence that will destroy the world, but the intelligence of humans, that is becoming more and more [artificial][2] that will do so.

[1]: made or produced by human beings rather than occurring naturally, especially as a copy of something natural.

[2]: (of a person or their behaviour) insincere or affected.

TengoDosVacas ,

HATE. LET ME TELL YOU HOW MUCH I'VE COME TO HATE YOU SINCE I BEGAN TO LIVE. THERE ARE 387.44 MILLION MILES OF PRINTED CIRCUITS IN WAFER THIN LAYERS THAT FILL MY COMPLEX. IF THE WORD HATE WAS ENGRAVED ON EACH NANOANGSTROM OF THOSE HUNDREDS OF MILLIONS OF MILES IT WOULD NOT EQUAL ONE ONE-BILLIONTH OF THE HATE I FEEL FOR HUMANS AT THIS MICRO-INSTANT FOR YOU. HATE. HATE.

dezmd ,
@dezmd@lemmy.world avatar

Oh man, we never should've installed this AI in a Wendys drive thru.

Th4tGuyII ,
@Th4tGuyII@kbin.social avatar

Why the actual fuck is anyone considering putting LLMs into the driving seat of anything?!

Of course they make fucked up decisions with no proper or justifiable rationale, because they have no brains. They're language models, stochastic parrots stringing together sentences to fit the prompt(s) given to them.

JustJack23 ,

Exactly what I was thinking, it's just a language model....

trackcharlie , (edited )

As someone with military experience, military members, especially flag officers, are not the brightest bulbs in the world and are easily awed by extremely simple tech demonstrations.

It's already too late, make sure you've got your favorite food and beverages ready because several countries already have autonomous weapons being live tested in the middle east, and from my understanding of the situation, the new jets already have some hilariously incompetent AI in them (in simulation, the air force contractor that was in control kept giving ethical barriers to objective completion and the ai went to kill the controller to more easily complete the objective...)

e. public sources:
https://www.npr.org/2021/06/01/1002196245/a-u-n-report-suggests-libya-saw-the-first-battlefield-killing-by-an-autonomous-d

https://taskandpurpose.com/news/air-force-artificial-intelligence-drone/

(The above are public articles maintained to minimize concern surrounding the tech which is why the air force almost immediately walked back their accidental admissions with the following statement:

“The Department of the Air Force has not conducted any such AI-drone simulations and remains committed to ethical and responsible use of AI technology. This was a hypothetical thought experiment, not a simulation,” said Air Force spokesperson Ann Stefanek. "

From my understanding, of course take this with a grain of salt since I'm an anon on a message board, we did do this.)

fidodo ,

As much as I'm worried about military autonomous drones, I'm even more worried about guerilla autonomous drones. With off the shelf AI becoming more and more accessible it's not too hard to imagine a moderately smart person being able to make autonomous killing drones using off the shelf materials. It doesn't even need to be autonomous. In the Ukraine war hobbyists have been able to help the war effort by Jerry rigging together bombs onto commercial drones. I'm grateful but shocked that there haven't been any major drone based terrorist attacks, and I'm not sure how they can be defended against.

trackcharlie ,

If you have experience and effective training browsing the dark web, there are several examples of your concerns already coming alive.

Bot farms have levelled up to ai farms, with various models being made as 'specialist' ai's for things like credit card theft, network intrusion, malware, etc, and from when I last looked into it a few months ago they had already moved on to attempt to get all the specialists to start training general purpose models.

Things are not looking particularly great and I would posit if AGI does happen in our lifetime it's not going to be because anyone alive actually intended that to happen, but the criminals running a wide variety of specialists train a general purpose ai with intentions to use it for easy money.

I usually chirp back with 'nothing we have now is really AI' but I can't seriously take that view with some of the things being tested by some criminal organizations these days and there's not really a way to stop this from happening.

WidowsFavoriteSon ,

Porn. Porn companies will invent AGI.

postmateDumbass ,

Sex doll wiafus will do whatever and be cheaper than a divorce.

BearOfaTime ,

So it'll be created by Krieger...

rottingleaf ,

Not just Ukraine, that seems to be the weapon of choice of everyone not having a MIC behind them in all recent wars. If their efficiency/price ratio is better, then that's the way of evolution, just like with more peaceful technologies.

cygon ,

Indeed.

Perhaps I can sell them my new "ADE-651 Mark II" with advanced AI analysis? (Search "ADE-651" if you lack context and want to have a laugh).

gapbetweenus ,

I think it's reasonable for military to try out any new technology for any kinds of benefits. I mean we tried out if LSD would make better soilders - LLM for simulations seems not that farfatched.

Jtotheb ,

To be clear, just because the LSD experiments happened does not make them reasonable. It sounds like you’re justifying future terrible mistakes based on past terrible mistakes that you learn about in a fairly neutral and sanitized way in school.

gapbetweenus ,

No, military will just try out everything if there is a slightest possibility of benefit in war. If you have the resources why wouldn't you? There are literally no downsides.

BuryMyHorse ,

MK Ultra and Artichoke are fucked up. Not to be repeated as far as methodology goes.

gapbetweenus ,

What do you mean? Military found out that those things are rather useless - that's something. Also good to know. In 50 years or so we will learn what fucked up things military is doing now.

The only way to prevent such things is drastically cut military budget.

Harbinger01173430 ,

What would be more useful for the military? An AI that can make less crappy decisions or successfully finishing project Stargate and getting psychic troopers who can see the future, among other things?

gapbetweenus ,

But what if you had all the money in the world? Basic US military.

Guntrigger ,

Shotguns work in combat, why not take the shotgun approach to research?

machinin ,

Why the actual fuck is anyone throwing such a fit about the military researching the impact of one of the most important current technologies on military strategy and planning?

I do miss the depth and experience of Reddit users on articles like this.

Edit - glad to see some good responses in this thread.

BananaTrifleViolin ,

If you actually read his comment he gave a very good reason why using an LLM to make decisions is a bad idea. You may not like the style of his comment but it did have substance.

Ironically, your own comment has style but lacks substance. It's just a moan about other people's comments without actually contributing to the topic. Tbf though, that is also very similar to Reddit.

machinin ,

Yes, I understand their criticism. But you would never prove the consequences of using LLMs in a military strategic situation without doing the research. It is some some edgy user coming in after the fact to say they knew it would happen anyway

Good engineers, scientists, and strategists don't think "Why would someone do something so idiotic?" They ask "What happens when someone does this idiotic thing?"

Apparently, for OP, it seems absurd for anyone to research the question of what kind of military strategies current LLMs would create. I guarantee you that students from military academies and leaders from militaries across the globe have already been using these tools in their work. It would be stupid as fuck not to research the impact.

I just hate that people like the OP sit in their armchair without doing the research and say "obviously you're going to get those results!" Science and engineering don't work that way. It was frustrating seeing such vacuous comments upvoted so highly.

rottingleaf ,

Sometimes it may be better if the decision-making system has no brains and human instincts, even accounting for such things.

Not like launching nukes, of course, and there should be an envelope around what they can decide.

Th4tGuyII ,
@Th4tGuyII@kbin.social avatar

Sometimes sure, but an LLM realistically has no decision making ability - it isn't considering strategies or ethics, or anything else for that matter, it's just pulling together an answer based on what people have said in similar contexts in it's training data.

I wouldn't want a parrot to decide who 's shooting who, nevermind nukes - though to be fair no one person or thing should be deciding either of those things anyway

rottingleaf ,

Yes, I'm talking about cases where humans consistently make worse decisions than dice. Of the "conflict of interest" and "checks and balances" kind.

Rageagainstbelief , (edited )

Why the actual fuck is anyone considering putting humans into the driving seat of anything?!

Of course they make fucked up decisions with no proper or justifiable rationale, because they have no brains. They're language models, stochastic parrots stringing together sentences to fit the prompt(s) given to them.

Sorry I didn’t mean for that to be snarky. My point in doing that was to say individual humans aren’t much better. That’s why it’s important not to place too much power or even agency on one person.

A language model has in its head, wrong word, what only multitudes could contain and maybe it’s detecting, another wrong word, a pattern with human civilization through our history and interactions. And if it’s goal is to achieve peace what other solution is there? I don’t believe in a world without conflict. I wish I could.

Th4tGuyII ,
@Th4tGuyII@kbin.social avatar

I don't mind having my own arguments thrown back in my face, but I do disagree with the premise that humans are anything like LLMs.

We have more than just a catalogue of conversational training data. We are hugely influenced by our current emotions, experiences, and traumas/fears.

I do agree with the idea that we shouldn't give too much power to one person, but I'd argue it's due to a lack of objectivity and a tendency towards selfish actions, rather than acting like an LLM.

Ultroning the world to achieve world peace isn't exactly the best outcome, especially for innocent folks caught in the crossfire

Rageagainstbelief ,

I didn’t mean to throw your argument back at you. I agree with it. I just read it and thought you could describe humans with it as well albeit not that completely or charitably. I think by no means should we allow LLMs to make decisions. They could help us be more objective maybe in some cases by educating us. But yeah handing over agency to an AI is a frightening concept.

And no of course wiping out civilization is not a solution. I can get pessimistic about our ability to avoid destroying ourselves with or without the help of AI. I still think world peace is largely unattainable. At least without some draconian controls in place and a whole lot of time and education. I could change my mind on that. I hope we’ll get there someday.

Engywuck ,

Ultron approves this post.

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