Where is this from?
The 1983 movie WarGames. This is the computer’s conclusion after simulating every possible outcome of Global Thermonuclear War.
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.
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.
Came here to say this. Turns out real life WOPR is nothing like a movie.
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.
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
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
AI is suicidal because it was trained on the internet and we’re all depressed here.
Civilization Gandhi, is that you?
DEFCON: Everybody dies…
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…
Leeroy Jenkins has doomed us all.
At least I got chicken
SHALL WE PLAY A GAME?Paywalled
Three posts away in my feed, a thread about the Pentagon demanding the AI provider for the military to remove safeguards.
I have wonderful dreams of walking through AI data centers destroying everthing. I really enjoy those, but in this one tiny case, can we blame the AI? The US deserves it.
I too am tired of the United States playing too many stupid games and not winning enough stupid prizes.
Pretty sure the “prize” is a government of pedos.
Same.
Maybe but sure as hell the rest of the world doesn’t.
More than fair. I should remember that my perspective is completely effed before I make jokes like that one.
I have wonderful dreams of walking through AI data centers destroying everthing.
No you don’t.
You watch my dreams and can attest to this? I HAVE MANY ADDITIONAL QUESTIONS
It was just an educated guess.
WHAT IS THE NAME OF THAT BRUNETTE I BEG YOU
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.
De-bullshitting that headline:
AIsProgrammers can’t stop their programs recommending nuclear strikes in war game simulationsAnd yeah that’s what happens inside a genocidal empire where “R&D” is strictly funded by the MIC.
Programmers can’t stop morons mistaking a glorified autocorrect program for a decision making device.
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.
