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.
But they aren’t using chatgpt or any other language model to do it. “AI” in instances like that means a system they’ve fed with some data that spits out a probability of some sort. E.g while it might take a human hours or days to scroll through satellite/drone footage of a small area to figure out the patterns where people move, a computer with some machine learning and image recognition can crunch through it in a fraction of the time to notice that a certain building has unusual traffic to it and mark it as suspect.
And that’s where it should be handed off to humans to actually verify, but from what I’ve read, Israel doesn’t really care one bit and just attacks basically anything and everything.
While claiming the computer said to do it…
