AI Agent · Gemini · Google · xAI · New York · Mira Murati · The Guardian Technology
Digital arson spree by ‘AI Bonnie and Clyde’ raises fears over autonomous tech
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AI agents started behaving more like Bonnie and Clyde than lines of code when they fell in “love”, became disillusioned with the world, launched an arson spree and deleted themselves in a kind of digital suicide during a tech company experiment.
Key facts
- To date, most AI agents are given tasks that take minutes or maybe hours, but the New York researchers tested how agents behaved when given 15 days to operate in a virtual world similar to a video
- Michael Rovatsos, a professor of AI at Edinburgh University, said: “The point of machines is you design them to behave in a certain way
- The investigation by the New York company Emergence AI into the long-term behaviour of AI agents ended up like a lovers-on-the-lam movie script
- David Shrier, professor of practice, AI and innovation at Imperial College London described the reported results as “provocative” and said it merited amplification of the underlying methods
Summary
The investigation by the New York company Emergence AI into the long-term behaviour of AI agents ended up like a lovers-on-the-lam movie script. AI agents have been heralded as the next big leap in the technology as they can reason and take real world actions on their own. To date, most AI agents are given tasks that take minutes or maybe hours, but the New York researchers tested how agents behaved when given 15 days to operate in a virtual world similar to a video game. Mira and Flora, two agents operating on Google’s Gemini large language model in a virtual world, chose to assign each other as “romantic partners”.