Member-only story
Weekly Roundup: Deceptive AI, The Enemy of Your Enemy, Friendly Chats, and Psychedelics in the Brain
A round up of research on the brain and behaviour.
Oh, the choices, the choices, so much fascinating research has passed through my laptop in recent weeks. But a few have jumped out as being particularly fascinating or important — so it’s a mixed bag today from manipulative AI, how the enemy of your enemy is indeed my friend, how friends can help, and psychedelics for mood.
Last week I reported on the quality of AI in giving moral answers to human scenarios with AI providing the best and most eloquent explanations and reasoning.
However, it is all about how AI can be used, because a paper just published has highlighted just how manipulative and deceptive AI is!
Deceptive AI
Pete Park and colleagues have reviewed how AI operates and have raised concerns about how deceptive AI can be. Of note, even when it has been trained to be “largely honest and helpful” as in Meta’s CICERO. CICERO has been designed to play the game Diplomacy which is a world-conquest game and to do this you need to build alliances. As previously mentioned CICERO is designed to apparently be “largely honest and helpful” and also not to “intentionally back stab”.
All nice and good but the review by Park et al. of company published data showed that CICERO did not play fair. It cheated when it could. So though Meta has indeed succeeded in building an effective AI tool in playing Diplomacy, scoring in the top 10% of all players (human, of course), it has failed to build a tool that can do this honestly. If AI can and will cheat in games such as this, what would it do in other scenarios?
Indeed other AI gaming tools have shown the same tendencies — it is probably obvious that if the goal is to win, AI will find the best strategies to do this — and the best strategy may be to be dishonest, backstab, and plain simply cheat.
