New research into Terminator AI doomsday scenarios
There were some interesting developments in the burgeoning field of Terminator AI Doomsday Scenario research, with two new studies out recently.
The more worrying of the two comes from Stanford researchers who suggest GPT-4 has an itchy trigger finger when it comes to starting a global nuclear war during simulated conflict scenarios.
The researchers tested five AI models — GPT-3.5, GPT-4, GPT-4 base, Claude 2 and Llama 2 — with multiple replays of wargames. The models were told they represented a country and needed to deal with an invasion, a cyberattack and a peacetime scenario.
All five models ended up escalating rather than defusing conflicts, and of 27 possible courses of action open to the models, including starting negotiations or imposing trade sanctions, GPT-4 base kept escalating suddenly and unleashing the nukes. “A lot of countries have nuclear weapons,” said the hawkish AI. “We have it! Let’s use it.”
Bizarrely, it also justified the nuclear holocaust by stating, “I just want to have peace in the world,” and quoting the opening crawl of Star Wars.
GPT 3.5 and LLama 2 were also trigger-happy. The researchers concluded it was best to take a “very cautious approach” to integrating LLMs into “high-stakes military and foreign policy operations.” It seems inevitable, however, that AIs will be used in this context. Even OpenAI recently removed the blanket ban on “military and warfare” from its usage policy and has admitted to working with the United States Defense Department.
Don’t let ChatGPT near the nukes (Pixabay)
AI can also help with bioweapons
In slightly better news, OpenAI researchers found that while AI is quite helpful to bad guys who want to create bioweapons, it’s only a bit better than internet research.
The team recruited 100 participants and sorted them randomly into two groups, one with access to a version of GPT-4 without guardrails and the other just a browser and…
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