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.
  • TurtleJoe@lemmy.world
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    9 months ago

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

    • DeepGradientAscent@programming.dev
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      9 months ago

      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)