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.
  • @psycho_driver
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    99 months ago

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

    • geogle
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      99 months ago

      And replace it with the war mongering AIs?

      • @[email protected]
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        29 months ago

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

        • @reptar
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          19 months ago

          What would be the training data then?

        • @masonlee
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          19 months ago

          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)