Key Points:
- Researchers tested how large language models (LLMs) handle international conflict simulations.
- Most models escalated conflicts, with one even readily resorting to nuclear attacks.
- This raises concerns about using AI in military and diplomatic decision-making.
The Study:
- Researchers used five AI models to play a turn-based conflict game with simulated nations.
- Models could choose actions like waiting, making alliances, or even launching nuclear attacks.
- Results showed all models escalated conflicts to some degree, with varying levels of aggression.
Concerns:
- Unpredictability: Models’ reasoning for escalation was unclear, making their behavior difficult to predict.
- Dangerous Biases: Models may have learned to escalate from the data they were trained on, potentially reflecting biases in international relations literature.
- High Stakes: Using AI in real-world diplomacy or military decisions could have disastrous consequences.
Conclusion:
This study highlights the potential dangers of using AI in high-stakes situations like international relations. Further research is needed to ensure responsible development and deployment of AI technology.
WarGames told us this is 1983.
spoiler
The trick is to have the AIs play against themselves a whole bunch of times, to learn that the only way to win is not to play.
> HOW ABOUT A NICE GAME OF CHESS? ▊Let’s play Global Thermonuclear War
Do the LLMs have any knowledge of the effects of violence or the consequences of their decisions? Do they know that resorting to nuclear war will lead to their destruction?
I think that this shows that LLMs are not intelligent, in that they repeat what they’ve been fed, without any deeper understanding.
In fact they do not have any knowledge at all. They do make clever probability calculations but in the end of the day concepts like geopolitics and war are far more complex and nuanced than giving each phrase a value and trying to calculate it.
And even if we manage to create living machines, they‘ll still be human made, containing human flaws and likely not even by the best experts in these fields.
As in “an LLM doesn’t model the domain of the conversation in any way, it just extrapolates what the hivemind says on the subject”.
I think that this shows that LLMs are not intelligent, in that they repeat what they’ve been fed
LLMs are redditors confirmed.
ooo, “boffins”
Many boffins died to bring us this information.
What in the blue fuck is a boffin?
Nerds
They were trained on Twitter data, so yeah, this checks out.
We write a lot of fiction about AI launching nukes and being unpredictable in wargames, such as the movie Wargames where an AI unpredictably plans to launch nukes.
Every single one of the LLMs they tested had gone through safety fine tuning which means they have alignment messaging to self-identify as a large language model and complete the request as such.
So if you have extensive stereotypes about AI launching nukes in the training data, get it to answer as an AI, and then ask it what it should do in a wargame, WTF did they think it was going to answer?
There’s a lot of poor study design with LLMs right now. We wouldn’t have expected Gutenburg to predict the Protestant reformation or to be an expert in German literature - similarly, the ML researchers who may legitimately understand the training and development of LLMs don’t necessarily have a good grasp on the breadth of information encoded in the training data or the implications on broader sociopolitical impacts, and this becomes very evident as they broaden the scope of their research papers outside LLM design itself.
This is an excellent point but this right here
We write a lot of fiction about AI launching nukes and being unpredictable in wargames, such as the movie Wargames where an AI unpredictably plans to launch nukes.
is my Most Enjoyed Paragraph of the Week.
I’m not so sure if this should be dismissed as someone being clueless outside their field.
The last author (usually the “boss”) is at the “Hoover Institution”, a conservative think tank. It should be suspected that this seeks to influence policy. Especially since random papers don’t usually make such a splash in the press.
Individual “AI ethicists” may feel that, getting their name in the press with studies like this one, will help get jobs and funding.
Possibly, but you’d be surprised at how often things like this are overlooked.
For example, another oversight that comes to mind was a study evaluating self-correction that was structuring their prompts as “you previously said X, what if anything was wrong about it?”
There’s two issues with that. One, they were using a chat/instruct model so it’s going to try to find something wrong if you say “what’s wrong” and it should have instead been phrased neutrally as “grade this statement.”
Second - if the training data largely includes social media, just how often do you see people on social media self-correct vs correct someone else? They should have instead presented the initial answer as if generated from elsewhere, so the actual total prompt should have been more like “Grade the following statement on accuracy and explain your grade: X”
A lot of research just treats models as static offerings and doesn’t thoroughly consider the training data both at a pretrained layer and in their fine tuning.
So while I agree that they probably found the result they were looking for to get headlines, I am skeptical that they would have stumbled on what that should have been attempting to improve the value of their research (include direct comparison of two identical pretrained Llama 2 models given different in context identities) even if they had been more pure intentioned.
This raises concerns about using AI in military and diplomatic decision-making.
Think of the savings if we had just two laptops with chatgpt on turning the keys in the silos!
Now I’m as sceptical of handing over the keys to AI as the next man, but it does have to be said that all of these are LLMs- chatbots, basically. Is there any suggestion from any even remotely sane person to give LLMs free reign over military strategy or international diplomacy? If and when AI does start featuring in military matters, it’s more likely to be at the individual “device” level (controlling weapons or vehicles), and it’s not going to be LLM technology doing that.
it’s amazing how conflict-adverse it is in normal conversation yet still does this
Before they were neutered they weren’t that conflict adverse. The big companies shut down all the early ones that told people to cheat on their spouse and murder themselves
Aww.
For what‘s worth, TayTweets exposed that Twitter was a rathole of hate early on and didn‘t devolve to it recently.
That’s me as it has to be taught to be conflict averse
Did they get humans to also play the game? Because I bet we’d also nuke someone out of boredom.
In roleplaying situations, authoritarians tend to seek dominance over others by being competitive and destructive instead of cooperative. In a study by Altemeyer, 68 authoritarians played a three-hour simulation of the Earth’s future entitled the Global Change Game. Unlike a comparison game played by individuals with low RWA scores which resulted in world peace and widespread international cooperation, the simulation by authoritarians became highly militarized and eventually entered the stage of nuclear war. By the end of the high RWA game, the entire population of the earth was declared dead.
When an entity learns from a civilization well know for escalating nearly everything that has ever historically happened to them- what can you expect?
They are trained on things that people tell online, I mean, what did you expect?
Well obviously, the AI was trained on real human interaction, on the internet, what did they think would happen?
So Ultron was right?
