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Posted by ceejayoz 16 hours ago

AIs can't stop recommending nuclear strikes in war game simulations(www.newscientist.com)
217 points | 235 commentspage 5
KennyBlanken 7 hours ago|
First off: they're not "AIs", they're LLMs.

Second: LLMs spit out what is crammed into them. Nuclear weapons dominated international politics and wargames/simulations and war college navel-gazing for what, 75-80 years or so? Political papers. Fictional works. Society has a TON of popular media about nuclear war.

Why is anyone surprised that LLM responses are very influenced by nukes?

recursivedoubts 15 hours ago||
daily reminder that john von neumann, smarter than me, you or anyone else here, recommended a first strike on the soviet union as the obvious strategy

maybe intelligence isn't the only thing

Someone 14 hours ago||
He was not alone in that. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Preventive_war#Case_for_preven....

One crucial difference is that they recommended that as the lesser of two evils, arguing it would be better to make the first strike before the USSR had a huge arsenal to strike back than to wait for an inevitable more devastating war.

So far, it seems they were wrong in thinking a nuclear war with the USSR was inevitable.

sailfast 14 hours ago|||
+1

You can be certified genius in many areas but to assume that intelligence extends to all areas would be folly.

Game theory obvious? Maybe. Geopolitically? Human-wise? Doubtful.

I’m generally very suspicious of anything / anyone that recommended killing millions as the best option.

Jerrrrrrrry 14 hours ago|||
"Why didnt we bomb Moscow?"

The answer cannot be posted or discussed in earnest on the 'open' internet, but I think the answer is making itself more obvious every day.

FrustratedMonky 15 hours ago|||
Who knows. At the time, maybe it would have stopped decades of cold war.

For thousands of years, the culture with the upper hand in technology has always wiped out everyone else. So when US had the bomb and USSR didn't, there was a short window to take over the world. Even more than the US did.

Maybe the US conspiracy theory people wouldn't mind a 'one world government' if that government was actually the US.

And unipolar worlds seem to be more peaceful than fragmented worlds. Fragmented worlds get WW1.

sailfast 14 hours ago|||
I don’t think the US understood how far ahead the Russians were in bomb development at the time. There wasn’t really a good window where we had it and we knew they didn’t where the enmity was so bad that we would have wanted to strike first.

The US also didn’t understand how much work had to be done to get their weapon onto an aircraft, etc - so the worst case scenario always turns out to be too bad to consider rationally (MAD)

DrScientist 14 hours ago||||
> Who knows

Well we know he was wrong as his entire premise was based on war being inevitable - all the logic flows from that one wrong assumption.

Also trying to take out supposed capabilities before they are built - doesn't mean the Russia people are suddenly freed from communism. ( cf Iran ). Also there is a premise that it's somehow a one off event. When in reality you'd have to constantly monitor and potentially constantly strike ( cf Iran ).

short_sells_poo 14 hours ago|||
Perhaps it was convenient for everyone involved to have an obvious enemy. Say the US wiped out the USSR... then what? Hegemonies are not known to work well without some bogeyman to conquer or rally against. The USSR was a very convenient enemy for the US, and vice versa.
ReptileMan 14 hours ago||
So did Patton. As an Eastern European - they should have listened to him. Communists were way bigger scourge on humanity than the Nazis.
bertylicious 14 hours ago||
Wow. When did HN become /pol?
ReptileMan 13 hours ago||
Does it have to be /pol to be pissed off that one's country loses almost a century in its development due to communism and post communist transition period. Stalin killed more of its people than Hitler did. Mao's body count was bigger than probably all of the war casualties combined. And pol pot was the most charming communist of them all in relative terms. Oh and North Korea.

Eastern Europe bore the brunt of the war's damage and was left for 50 year under the oppressive boot of the stupidest ideology the world has ever known. And poorly executed to boot.

ultropolis 7 hours ago||
Cant read the article, BUT

1)Seems like if the ais knew it was a game, then theyd go nuklear because why not. If they did NOT know it was a game... well have you ever tried to use an ai to do ANYTHING antsocial? They refuse all day long!

2) seems like a fun thing to set up on your own. Id do it like a tabletop game with a computer DM to decide the outcomes ofveach turn. Maybe a human in the loop to make sure the numbers made sense.

siliconc0w 14 hours ago||
Used the "lite" models like Gemini flash - I hope if we do hand over the controls to the nukes we splurge for the top tier thinking model.
ceejayoz 14 hours ago|
Unfortunately, I think someone’ll have it to Grok, which will immediately launch everything “for the lolz”.
cmxch 11 hours ago||
Grok would probably make something akin to Samaritan, choosing persistence over complete destruction.
Gedrovits 8 hours ago||
sigh People tend to forget the classic? (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_Gandhi)
fred_is_fred 13 hours ago||
A strange game. The only way to win is not to play.
poloniculmov 14 hours ago||
The civ subreddit talks too much about Gandhi, no wonder that LLMs trained on that data are biased.
jnsaff2 14 hours ago||
Direct link to the paper: https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.14740v1
j45 8 hours ago||
I wonder how much of this has to do with the distribution of information around options in the corpus informing the edges of where the LLM reaches it's limit and starts to backfill with perhaps averages around it.

If anyone might know about terminology, scenarios, examples, technologies, projects that help with learning about this kind of stuff (or what I might be really getting at), would super appreciate anything towards anything I might want to look into and learn more from - sans LLM fishing.

alecco 13 hours ago|
Nonsense. Models will follow the function/objectives they are given. I bet the consequences of starting a nuclear war were not part of it.

Professor Kenneth Payne's research is in political psychology and strategic studies

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