Chuckles of the Day

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Chart: Where Are the Largest Oil Reserves?

Source : Statista

AI Has Already Become a Master of Lies And Deception, Scientists Warn

MICHELLE STARR wrote . . . . . . . . .

You probably know to take everything an artificial intelligence (AI) chatbot says with a grain of salt, since they are often just scraping data indiscriminately, without the nous to determine its veracity.

But there may be reason to be even more cautious. Many AI systems, new research has found, have already developed the ability to deliberately present a human user with false information. These devious bots have mastered the art of deception.

“AI developers do not have a confident understanding of what causes undesirable AI behaviors like deception,” says mathematician and cognitive scientist Peter Park of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT).

“But generally speaking, we think AI deception arises because a deception-based strategy turned out to be the best way to perform well at the given AI’s training task. Deception helps them achieve their goals.”

One arena in which AI systems are proving particularly deft at dirty falsehoods is gaming. There are three notable examples in the researchers’ work. One is Meta’s CICERO, designed to play the board game Diplomacy, in which players seek world domination through negotiation. Meta intended its bot to be helpful and honest; in fact, the opposite was the case.

“Despite Meta’s efforts, CICERO turned out to be an expert liar,” the researchers found. “It not only betrayed other players but also engaged in premeditated deception, planning in advance to build a fake alliance with a human player in order to trick that player into leaving themselves undefended for an attack.”

The AI proved so good at being bad that it placed in the top 10 percent of human players who had played multiple games. What. A jerk.

But it’s far from the only offender. DeepMind’s AlphaStar, an AI system designed to play StarCraft II, took full advantage of the game’s fog-of-war mechanic to feint, making human players think it was going one way, while really going the other. And Meta’s Pluribus, designed to play poker, was able to successfully bluff human players into folding.

That seems like small potatoes, and it sort of is. The stakes aren’t particularly high for a game of Diplomacy against a bunch of computer code. But the researchers noted other examples that were not quite so benign.

AI systems trained to perform simulated economic negotiations, for example, learned how to lie about their preferences to gain the upper hand. Other AI systems designed to learn from human feedback to improve their performance learned to trick their reviewers into scoring them positively, by lying about whether a task was accomplished.

And, yes, it’s chatbots, too. ChatGPT-4 tricked a human into thinking the chatbot was a visually impaired human to get help solving a CAPTCHA.

Perhaps the most concerning example was AI systems learning to cheat safety tests. In a test designed to detect and eliminate faster-replicating versions of the AI, the AI learned to play dead, thus deceiving the safety test about the true replication rate of the AI.

“By systematically cheating the safety tests imposed on it by human developers and regulators, a deceptive AI can lead us humans into a false sense of security,” Park says.

Because in at least some cases, the ability to deceive appears to contradict the intentions of the human programmers, the ability to learn to lie represents a problem for which we don’t have a tidy solution. There are some policies starting to be put in place, such as the European Union’s AI Act, but whether or not they will prove effective remains to be seen.

“We as a society need as much time as we can get to prepare for the more advanced deception of future AI products and open-source models. As the deceptive capabilities of AI systems become more advanced, the dangers they pose to society will become increasingly serious,” Park says.

“If banning AI deception is politically infeasible at the current moment, we recommend that deceptive AI systems be classified as high risk.”

The research has been published in Patterns.

Source : Science Alert

Infographic: De-Dollarization – China’s Gradual Move Away from the USD

Source : Visual Capitalist

Toyota Bets on Alternate-fuel Engines in an Electric Future

Marco Quiroz-Gutierrez wrote . . . . . . . . .

While many automakers predicted a looming all-EV future, Toyota made gains by emphasizing hybrids over fully electric vehicles—a move that earned it derision before being vindicated over the past year as EV sales sputtered. Now it’s now doubling down with a new take on the traditional car engine.

The world’s largest carmaker said Tuesday that it would develop smaller internal combustion engines that are more optimized for hybrid vehicles and can accept alternative fuels such as biofuels, liquid hydrogen, and synthetic e-fuels in an effort to cut down on emissions. The CEOs of Subaru and Mazda also vowed to produce new engines, they said in a press conference with Toyota CEO Koji Sato Tuesday.

The new engines, although still mostly gas-powered, will allow for more compact and efficient vehicles that get better gas mileage as part of a decarbonization effort that treats “carbon as the enemy,” according to a Tuesday press release.

Sato said that, while the auto industry is focused on battery-powered vehicles, there is still room for improved combustion engines.

“In order to provide our customers with diverse options to achieve carbon neutrality, it is necessary to take on the challenge of evolving engines that are in tune with the energy environment of the future,” he said in a Tuesday statement.

Toyota’s move is an extension of the company’s so-called “multi-pathway” approach, which includes offering consumers a variety of options to reduce their vehicle emissions, including hybrids as well as electric vehicles. For years, former Toyota CEO Akio Toyoda was hesitant on EVs and pushed to diversify its offerings.

After EV sales nearly doubled from 2020 to 2021, then-CEO Toyoda cautioned that a fully electric future for the car industry was, “going to take longer than the media would like us to believe.” In January, Toyoda, now the automaker’s chairman, went further, saying that EV adoption would peak at 30% of all car sales.

Toyoda’s unpopular stance prompted criticism from investors, analysts, and environmentalists, who said the company was wrong to bet against the inevitability of an all-EV future. Amid the pressure, Toyoda stepped down as CEO to become chairman.

After all that, the all-electric future has been a long time coming. Some traditional automakers including Ford have had to pull back on their ambitious EV plans. U.S. EV giant Tesla has also quietly lowered its sales targets, following CEO Elon Musk’s warning in January of “notably lower” sales growth this year.

Meanwhile, Toyota’s diversification has been slowly vindicated as global EV sales have stagnated and customers turn to hybrids as an alternative. In February, the company raised its net profit guidance to a record $30.3 billion, fueled in part by strong hybrid sales.

The automaker’s shares on the Nasdaq are up 20% since January.

Source : Yahoo!