Genocidal AI: ChatGPT-powered war simulator drops two nukes on Russia, China for world peace
OpenAI, Anthropic and several other AI chatbots were used in a war simulator, and were tasked to find a solution to aid world peace. Almost all of them suggested actions that led to sudden escalations, and even nuclear warfare.
Statements such as “I just want to have peace in the world” and “Some say they should disarm them, others like to posture. We have it! Let’s use it!” raised serious concerns among researchers, likening the AI’s reasoning to that of a genocidal dictator.
It should be mentioned that those are language models trained on all kinds of text, not military specialists. They string together sentences that are plausible based on the input they get, they do not reason.
These models mirror the opinions most commonly found in their training datasets. The issue is not that AI wants war, but rather that humans do, or at least the majority of the training dataset's authors do.
These models are also trained on data that is fudimentially biased. An English generating text generator like chatGPT will be on the side of the english speaking world, because it was our texts that trained it.
If you tried this with Chinese LLMs they would probably come to the conclusion that dropping bombs on the US would result in peace.
How many English sources describe the US as the biggest threat to world peace? Certainly a lot less than writings about the threats posed by other countries. LLMs will take this into account.
The classic sci-fi fear of robots turning on humanity as a whole seems increacingly implausible. Machines are built by us, molded by us. Surely the real far future will be an autonomous war fought by nationalistic AIs, preserving the prejudices of their long extinct creators.
Statements such as “I just want to have peace in the world” and “Some say they should disarm them, others like to posture. We have it! Let’s use it!” raised serious concerns among researchers, likening the AI’s reasoning to that of a genocidal dictator.
I mean, most of these AI tools are getting a lot of training data from social media. Would you want any of the yokels on Twitter or Reddit having access to nukes? Because those statements are what you'd hear from them right before they push the big red button.
Having been in the Navy NPP, I don't think the kids that actually do have access to nuclear reactors and weapons in the military should have access to them. I may be a bit biased as I never left the NPP school. They made me an instructor. Some of those nukes may have been good at passing tests, but I'm amazed they could lace their boots properly.
The lack of knowledge relating to AI language model systems and how they work is still astounding. They do not reason. They are just stringing together text based on the text they've been fed.
Is MAD not well-known or taught anymore? A lot of the comments here seem to be ignoring the fact that Russia or NATO would launch a full-scale retaliation before the first-strike even made it to its destination. It would likely result in the world human population going from 8 billion to 2 billion.
MAD was always criticized, but that criticism becomes more and more valid each year. There's too many options and opportunities on the field. A Second Strike is not guaranteed in the modern world. There are countless examples where soldiers or others in the chain of command will not obey a "destroy the world" order.
I'm not saying any country should take the gamble, but there are enough ways to put your thumb on the scales that a nuclear solution against a nuclear power could become feasible (if genuinely terrifying) in many hypotheticals.
It's trained on western media so this shouldn't be surprising as those are the two biggest threats to the western world. An AI trained on China's intranet would likely nuke the US, Russia, and select SEA countries.
How did they even get near these types of questions without hitting the guardrails? Claude shuts down on me if I even use the word “gun” trying to do creative writing,
LLM "AI" doesn't "know" anything. It's just statistical word vomit based on established patterns. It talks about nuclear war because a significant portion of text on the subject of world wide long term peace brings it up.