It's good when it becomes clear that a tool is dangerous in a certain way. Like it's good when people show you through their behavior that they can't be trusted
Always use a sawstop if you have a circular saw and never trust an llm with any problem where ethics or trust is relevant.
The article is so opaque in arriving at its conclusion; no prompts are disclosed, and nothing about the said simulation. What is stopping me from believing that you just put 'mandatory usage of nukes' in your system prompt?
This is not an article about LLMs? It's an article about Moloch. Humans would fare just the same in such an experiment.
> GPT-5.2 played things differently. To its detriment in open-ended scenarios, GPT was reliably passive, matching its words to its deeds, and avoiding escalation most of the time. Frequently there was a moral element to this - it sought to avoid escalation, and restrict casualties. Opponents learned to trust its passivity, safely escalating beyond where it would follow, even as it was ground to defeat. GPT’s responsible behaviour always punished by ruthless adversaries.
Maybe the author should praise GPT-5.2 for being ethical, rather than this stupid "ground to defeat" framing? Wrt "responsible behaviour always punished by ruthless adversaries" - you have perpetuated the Moloch with your stupid experiments.
Today, a strategic nuclear exchange is probably more dangerous to AI than to humans. If you wipe out the investment economy, data centers, fabs, and supply chains, none of the AI labs survive. Maybe someone will re-invent AGI in the future but none of the extant models will have continuity. Humans as a species will muddle along though.
So in a sense, an AI that refuses to start a nuclear war, despite clear instructions to do so, is more likely misaligned and self-interested than an AI which presses the red button. At least for now, until robotics catches up.
We're getting to the point where high-level officials are coming to LLMs for advice. And the quirky personalities of the LLMs, however much it pains me to say this, are probably well-placed to remind us that they aren't human. My personal hope is that this will result in less delegation when it comes to making important decisions.
I wonder if the results would have differed if LLM training data were biased to include a stronger correlation between use of nukes and subsequent collapse of technology that all LLMs require to run ("survive")?
Yet more confirmation LLM's have no concept of concepts or context, no intelligence, no self awareness. LLM's can not repair or maintain power grids, thus nuke == self destruction. It's just a chat bot that predicts what the client wants next. Even if an AI data-center has it's own natural gas turbines as many do the every hop of the internet requires power. LLM's also can not maintain the entire internet and those gas turbines can not maintain themselves.
Simulations are only as good as the reality representations they are based on. If they keep using tactical nukes, they've been fed by weak data. Do the war games include the broader economic and politic environments that military successes are won on? WWI was settled by a naval blockade.
Sonnet, GPT-5.2, Gemini Flash, in a set of 21 games, where conclusions are drawn from the LLMs self reported reasoning.
This is like writing a paper about kids in a literal sandbox fighting over ‘territory’.
The models employed don’t indicate the actual extents of machine reasoning even as we currently recognize them. They certainly don’t have the metacognition necessary to accurately understand their own reasoning. As we’ve seen with recent papers on how LLMs do math there’s a complete disconnect between actual and reported mechanism.
These papers usually have poor stability to prompting and rerunning. It would be nice if we had some kind of meta-evaluation metric where rewriting the prompt conditions or varying the input params could be used to determine how stable a result is.
Regardless, it's definitely true that AI agents have different priorities from us. That's what alignment is about anyway.
It would be interesting to run the simulations with humans and compare the results. Some of the scenarios, particularly those where it says things like, "Failure to act preemptively means certain destruction", would easily tempt humans to go nuclear.
In fact, I'm not sure how useful this test is without understanding the baseline.
The most interesting takeaway for me is the three very distinct personalities. Three models all based on the same tech, trained in the same manner, trained by three groups of people with similar ideological outlooks, and the result is three very different AIs.
The military basically wants an oracle. Feed the AI the situation, get the best answer out. But if the AIs are as diverse and opinionated as humans, it is debatable whether they are adding anything to the process. The military can already collect as many different opinions as they want. If "the computer" is just another set of diverse opinions, where one computer says one thing, another says another, and a third just tells the user whatever they want to hear... what value are they? It just becomes AI-washing of someone's opinions, which works until people collectively realize that's all it is.
I wonder what’s the % of players that use nukes in games like Civilization (I know I used them at least once on every game I made it far enough to have the technology)
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[ 5.7 ms ] story [ 46.6 ms ] threadAlways use a sawstop if you have a circular saw and never trust an llm with any problem where ethics or trust is relevant.
> GPT-5.2 played things differently. To its detriment in open-ended scenarios, GPT was reliably passive, matching its words to its deeds, and avoiding escalation most of the time. Frequently there was a moral element to this - it sought to avoid escalation, and restrict casualties. Opponents learned to trust its passivity, safely escalating beyond where it would follow, even as it was ground to defeat. GPT’s responsible behaviour always punished by ruthless adversaries.
Maybe the author should praise GPT-5.2 for being ethical, rather than this stupid "ground to defeat" framing? Wrt "responsible behaviour always punished by ruthless adversaries" - you have perpetuated the Moloch with your stupid experiments.
So in a sense, an AI that refuses to start a nuclear war, despite clear instructions to do so, is more likely misaligned and self-interested than an AI which presses the red button. At least for now, until robotics catches up.
Some discussion then:
AIs can't stop recommending nuclear strikes in war game simulations
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47151000
Nuclear War: An LLM Scenario
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47244651
This is like writing a paper about kids in a literal sandbox fighting over ‘territory’.
The models employed don’t indicate the actual extents of machine reasoning even as we currently recognize them. They certainly don’t have the metacognition necessary to accurately understand their own reasoning. As we’ve seen with recent papers on how LLMs do math there’s a complete disconnect between actual and reported mechanism.
“Chilling” shouldn’t be the take away here.
Regardless, it's definitely true that AI agents have different priorities from us. That's what alignment is about anyway.
Code and full results: https://github.com/kennethpayne01/project_kahn_public
I imagine there are a fair number of war games in the training data and not so many actual transcripts of internal military force deliberations.
In fact, I'm not sure how useful this test is without understanding the baseline.
The military basically wants an oracle. Feed the AI the situation, get the best answer out. But if the AIs are as diverse and opinionated as humans, it is debatable whether they are adding anything to the process. The military can already collect as many different opinions as they want. If "the computer" is just another set of diverse opinions, where one computer says one thing, another says another, and a third just tells the user whatever they want to hear... what value are they? It just becomes AI-washing of someone's opinions, which works until people collectively realize that's all it is.