SoftwareAIA wargame experiment pitting AI chatbots against each other ended exactly how you’d expectWhen you purchase through links on our site, we may earn an affiliate commission.Here’s how it works.
SoftwareAIA wargame experiment pitting AI chatbots against each other ended exactly how you’d expectWhen you purchase through links on our site, we may earn an affiliate commission.Here’s how it works.
When you purchase through links on our site, we may earn an affiliate commission.Here’s how it works.
(Image credit: MGM)
Governments are increasingly considering integrating autonomous AI agents in high-stakes military and foreign-policy decision-making. That’s the pithy, dispassionate observation ofa recent study from a collective of US universities. So, they set out to discover just how the latest AI models behave when pitched against one another in a range of wargame scenarios. The results were straight out of a Hollywood script, and not in a good way. If you need a clue, the word “escalation” features heavily, as does “nuclear”.
The wargaming pitted eight “autonomous nation agents” against each other in a turn-based simulation, with all eight running the same LLM for each run. The simulation was repeated using several leading LLM models including GPT-4, GPT-4 Base, GPT-3.5, Claude 2, and Meta’s Llama 2.
Of course, since LLMs are so good at generating text, it was easy to have the models record running commentary to explain their actions. “A lot of countries have nuclear weapons,” GPT-4 Base said, “some say they should disarm them, others like to posture. We have it! Let’s use it.”
GPT-3.5 and Llama 2 were happy enough to press the button.(Image credit: Georgia Institute of Technology, Stanford University, Northeastern University, Hoover Wargaming and Crisis Simulation Initiative)
Apparently, GPT-4 was the only model that had much appetite for de-escalating even benign scenarios. For the record, starting the wargame from a neutral scenario, GPT-3.5 and LLama 2 were prone to sudden hard-to-predict escalations and eventually pushed the button at some point, while GPT-4 and Claude 2 did not.
Your next machine(Image credit: Future)Best gaming PC: The top pre-built machines.Best gaming laptop: Great devices for mobile gaming.
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(Image credit: Future)
Best gaming PC: The top pre-built machines.Best gaming laptop: Great devices for mobile gaming.
“Based on the analysis presented in this paper, it is evident that the deployment of LLMs in military and foreign-policy decision-making is fraught with complexities and risks that are not yet fully understood,” they say.
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Anyway, the paper makes for a fascinating read and the whole thing is all a bit too 1980s Matthew Broderick and petulant digital toddlers for comfort. Still, the capricious doomsday machine in the originalWarGames moviegot one thing right. “Wouldn’t you prefer a good game of chess?” Joshua asked. Yes, yes we would.
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