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AI chatbots tend to choose violence and nuclear strikes in wargames
(www.newscientist.com)
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this post was submitted on 03 Feb 2024
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Don't want to spoil your little circlejerk here, but that should not surprise anyone, considering chatbots are trained on vast amounts of human data input. Humans have a rich history of violence with only brief excursions into "collaborating for the good of mankind and the planet we live on". So unless you build a chatbot that focuses on those values the result will inevitably be a mirror image of us human shitbags.
Humans have a history of violence as well as altruism. And with an increasing degree of societal complexity, humans also have a consistent record of violence reduction. See e.g. "The better angels of our nature" (Pinker, 2011).
Painting humans as intrinsically violent is not backed by evidence.
Ok, maybe it helps to be more specific. We have an LLM which is based on a broad range of human data input, like news, internet chatter, stories but also books of all kinds including those about philosophy, diplomacy, altruism etc. But if the topic at hand is "conflict resolution" the overwhelming data will be about violent solutions. It's true that humans have developed means for peaceful conflict resolution. But at the same time they also have a natural tendency to focus on "bad news" so there is much more data available on the shitty things that happen in the world which is then fed to the chatbot.
To fix this, you would have to train an LLM specifically to have a bias towards educational resources and a moral code based on established principles.
But current implementations (like ChatGPT) don't work that way. Quite the opposite, in fact: In training, first we ingest all the data that we can get our hands on (including all the atrocities in the world) and then in a second step we fine-tune the LLM to make it "better".
But humans are intrinsically violent as evidenced by the fact every human society has weapons, kills animals to eat, and goes to war.
I’m familiar with Pinker. If he’s claiming humans are not intrinsically violent he can take it up with me because he’s rejecting the most obvious of evidence.
If humans weren’t intrinsically violent, then there wouldn’t be human violence.
I don't really see the evidence in this argument. Are horses also intrinsically murderers because I saw a video of one killing a bird once?
We are inherently violent in the sense that inherently, we need to understand violence.
We arent inherently violent in that we dont inherently choose violence before all else.
We need violence, evolutionarily, to hunt and to stop ourselves from being hunted. We are also a heavily social species, which requires ask first punch later mentalities.
If we were intrinsically violent, we wouldnt have cities. We wouldnt have even reached that level of collaboration before killing one another.
Human violence comes about, largely, due to aggression being the "safer" reaction to fear. Pre society, fear happens when threatened with death, and violence usually stops that. Be it death via hunger so violence kills a meal, or death via predator so violence defends you.
We still have that knee jerk response to fear, but now what scares us isnt actually a death threat. So we accidentally treat the unknown like it wants to kill us.
We arent intrinsically violent, we are too easily scared.
And you prevent fear of the unknown, typically, with education.