Researchers say AI models like GPT4 are prone to “sudden” escalations as the U.S. military explores their use for warfare.

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.
  • EdibleFriend@lemmy.worldEnglish
    272·
    10 months ago

    Nobody would ever actually take chatgpt and put it in control of weapons so this is basically a non story. Very real chance we will have some kind of AI weapons in the future but…not fucking chatgpt lol

    • jonne@infosec.pubEnglish
      103·
      10 months ago

      The Israeli military is using AI to provide targets for their bombs. You could argue it’s not going great, except for the fact that Israel can just deny responsibility for bombing children by saying the computer did it.

      • Evkob@lemmy.caEnglish
        171·
        10 months ago

        I hadn’t heard about this so I did a quick web search to read up on the topic.

        Holy fuck, they named their war AI “The Gospel”??!! That’s supervillain-in-a-crappy-movie shit. How anyone can see Israel in a positive light throughout this conflict stuns me.

        • jonne@infosec.pubEnglish
          11·
          10 months ago

          Imagine the headlines and hysteria if Russia did even half the shit Israel did.

      • JohnEdwa@sopuli.xyzEnglish
        8·
        10 months ago

        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…