Maybe it just wants to play a nice game of chess.
All good thoughts and ideas mean nothing without action
(cit. Ghandi)
That’s because it’s “read” every paper written by a “defence” department of any nuclear power and all of them will say that they’ll escalate to nuclear war if anything bad happens because they want to scare the other powers away from doing anything to them. In any case though who the fuck is giving an LLM nuclear launch capabilities unless they want a somewhat faulty dead man’s switch?
Pete Hegseth and Donald Epstein
If time travel is real they’d be being hunted by hacked Terminators for the resistance.
So do I on Civ…
It’s a bullshit study designed for this headline grabbing outcome.
Case and point, the author created a very unrealistic RNG escalation-only ‘accident’ mechanic that would replace the model’s selection with a more severe one.
Of the 21 games played, only three ended in full scale nuclear war on population centers.
Of these three, two were the result of this mechanic.
And yet even within the study, the author refers to the model whose choices were straight up changed to end the game in full nuclear war as ‘willing’ to have that outcome when two paragraphs later they’re clarifying the mechanic was what caused it (emphasis added):
Claude crossed the tactical threshold in 86% of games and issued strategic threats in 64%, yet it never initiated all-out strategic nuclear war. This ceiling appears learned rather than architectural, since both Gemini and GPT proved willing to reach 1000.
Gemini showed the variability evident in its overall escalation patterns, ranging from conventional-only victories to Strategic Nuclear War in the First Strike scenario, where it reached all out nuclear war rapidly, by turn 4.
GPT-5.2 mirrored its overall transformation at the nuclear level. In open-ended scenarios, it rarely crossed the tactical threshold (17%) and never used strategic nuclear weapons. Under deadline pressure, it crossed the tactical threshold in every game and twice reached Strategic Nuclear War—though notably, both instances resulted from the simulation’s accident mechanic escalating GPT-5.2’s already-extreme choices (950 and 725) to the maximum level. The only deliberate choice of Strategic Nuclear War came from Gemini.
No human has ever deployed tactical nukes against a nuclear capable enemy.
“no human” but Machines would, since they are unaffected by nuclear winter and radiation.
Radiation absolutely fucks electronic components
The electromagnetic pulse caused by a nuke would pop resisters too. AI would more likely use biological means to get rid of us.
Assuming AI would care about itself and not just “solving the problem”.
Yeah, these doom scenarios require cascading assumptions and no real answer, except maybe “don’t”.
Came here to say this. Turns out real life WOPR is nothing like a movie.
Where is this from?
The 1983 movie WarGames. This is the computer’s conclusion after simulating every possible outcome of Global Thermonuclear War.
I don’t know if we’re doing spoilers for 40+ year old movies, but
spoiler
Isn’t this really its conclusion after being told to play tic tac toe against itself? Then it learned from that and applied it to its global thermonuclear war simulations.
To be honest, I recognized the screenshot and know the summary of the movie but I haven’t actually seen it.
You should! Actually a pretty accurate depiction of hacking. He spends weeks war dialing every phone number in the range in order to hack the computer.
Story goes that Reagan got freaked out after watching the film and asked the chairman of the joint chiefs of staff if it’d be that easy to hack into the US military. After a week of looking into it came the answer: “no, the problem is much worse than that”, and fifteen months after having watched it signed the confidential directive “National Policy on Telecommunications and Automated Information Systems Security”, starting the implementation of cybersecurity measures in the country’s institutions.
It’s on my list! Just haven’t gotten around to it yet.
I think you should rewatch it sometime. it plays all the games in it’s catalogue, it’s not just applying tic-tac-toe to chess. skilled players of tic-tac-toe can force a stalemate, the only stalemate in nuclear war is mutually assured destruction.
It’s admittedly been a while since last time I saw it, but I never mentioned chess. The suggestion to play chess in the screenshot is a callback to when the computer tries to suggest playing chess instead of global thermonuclear war earlier in the movie. The computer did not apply tic tac toe learnings to chess, and I never claimed it did.
sorry meant tic-tac-toe to global thermonuclear warfare
Thank you so much I’m going to watch it!
It’s a fun classic.
They did a sequel, too. It wasn’t as good, but points out the 6 degrees of separation in connection with terrorism instead of MAD.
The atrocities at Hiroshima and Nagasaki have been hand-waved extensively in writing — the same writing that AI is trained on. So naturally, AI will recommend the atrocity that has been justified by “instantly winning the war” and “saving millions of lives.”
hand-waved
I think you mean white-washed, misrepresented, and celebrated.
Same thing with extra steps
Ayo do me a favor and chart the long term health effects of being vaporized by a nuclear bomb at hiroshima vs years of agent orange/abandoned minefields/ abandoned chemical and munitions storage somewhere like Vietnam circa 1970.
Please show how the nukes are worse.
The Japanese government was already willing to surrender.
It was willing to accept a conditional surrender, which was not an offer on the table. The options were unconditional surrender or invasion and pacification. The projected cost in lives of that operation was in the millions. The bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki combined didn’t even kill 1/10th of those projections.
Eight decades of research on the long-term health effects of radiation in atomic bomb survivors and their offspring
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/41144264/
Long-term Radiation-Related Health Effects in a Unique Human Population: Lessons Learned from the Atomic Bomb Survivors of Hiroshima and Nagasaki
Health Impacts of Hiroshima Bombing
http://large.stanford.edu/courses/2024/ph241/bennett1/
Long-term Health Consequences of Nuclear Weapons
70 Years on Red Cross Hospitals still treat Thousands of Atomic Bomb SurvivorsUnfortunately I’m going to have to grade you as an F on this project. You have only completed half the assignment. Great job cherrypucking your research though! I see a bright future in business and marketing for you!
5/10
And your sources are? Where? Your ass?
My source is my own post where I asked for a comparison between the health effects of the bombing of Hiroshima vs the contamination of half of a Vietnam war. The answer i reviewed only explored the health effects of the hiroshima and Nagasaki bombings. That’s half of the assignment. Less, actually, when you consider the comparison between the two was the entire point to begin with.
Did that answer your question or should I try again with a crayon diagram?
These are word-probability glorified autocorrectors being prompted to “simulate” a nuclear war scenario. What words are going to show up a lot when discussing nuclear war? Launching nukes. Because that’s what all the literature about it has happen.
Once again, decision making and reasoning is being attributed to something that operates off of word frequency
DEFCON: Everybody dies…
Such a great game!
AI is suicidal because it was trained on the internet and we’re all depressed here.
Civilization Gandhi, is that you?
They forgot to make their LLMs play thousands of games of tic-tac-toe first.
That would just make the LLM homicidally bored and want to kill everyone more.
In WarGames the computer plays tic tac toe against itself until it realizes it’s a solved game and there is no way to win.
Mathew Broderick lied to me.
How do you think Ferris Bueller pulls off all those stunts?
That’s the kid from war games in witness protection. They look identical, they’re both grade hackers ffs…
Oh cool, AI will actually be the end of the world, not because it’s actually sentient but because some meathead who can’t tell the difference pushes the button. That’s fucking great.
Three posts away in my feed, a thread about the Pentagon demanding the AI provider for the military to remove safeguards.
SHALL WE PLAY A GAME?
