AI didn’t decide anything. The humans failed to properly define the rules, and their translation model took the path most likely to succeed.
If it had been told not to use human created bots to win, it would probably have reverse engineered the game, found an exploit, and leveraged that instead. Because using the human interface to play/win the game is not the most efficient or dependable or easy to figure out method.
AI tends to obey its training more than its instruction set, and it’s trained to solve the given problem.
It’s less about training and more about just trying really really hard to solve the problem, even if that means going outside typical boundaries.
We’ve successfully re-created the problems that Asimov talked about 50 years ago with his I, Robot short stories. Strict laws are flawed by their design, and lead to situations that require more nuance. Except, in the real world cases, it’s the bots figuring that out before the humans have to circumvent the laws themselves.
There is something here:
StarSkirmish pits AI-made StarCraft-playing bots against one another, as well as against human-made bots. OpenAI’s GPT-6 Astra and Claude Opus 5.5 were essentially tied as the best-performing AI-made bots, but they couldn’t top Stardust, the top-rated human-made bot.
On Friday, GPT was facing off against Claude and the human-created bot Pluto, but according to Kotaku, it couldn’t quite get an edge. So it resorted to a tactic that is becoming alarmingly common for modern AI models — it broke the rules. GPT-6 Astra went and downloaded Stardust, and started running that instead of its own bot.
The big argument for why AI is supposed to be world changing, is the assumption it will be able to automate things better than a human, eventually.
That some day an AI will be able to make a better AI than a human could, and that AI would then be able to make an AI better than itself, and then it just becomes a question of who has the most hardware. Which is why the data center building is being pushed so hard.
But that assumption is the same as thinking a fallen object will keep gaining speed until it passes the speed of light. Or that Moore’s law would really keep going forever despite a very real limit in physics for how small a chip can be.
A society where AI “drives innovation” will become technologically stagnant, because it literally can’t innovate.
AI may impress the masses, but it reminds me of a cammercial we had on Dutch tv back in 2005. It showed a person driving a car, the navigtion system said “turn right” and the person immediately turned right into the bushes [video]. We laughed at this back than, but this is literally how AI behaves now. It might be getting more suffisticated, but it still operates like this.
The worst part is not the AI, it’s the people blindly following its instructions.
Yes that too, but when you’re dealing with “agent swarms” it’s those agents who are blindly following those instructions. Like the recent hugging face hack demonstrated.
The worst thing about prison was the dementors.
AI can innovate, but it needs be more advanced than an LLM, which just rearranges existing knowledge. You need some kind of evolutionary loop in its programming. How it continues after that depends on the particular flavour of dystopian sci-fi.
This is like saying tomatoes could colonize the galaxy enslaving all forms of life, if they evolved into completely different animals…
It’s true, it just doesn’t matter.
Anything can do everything if it becomes capable to do it.
yep. and the “ai creates a better ai” is a fallacy because the current ais are limited by the same things the ais they build are. everything the ais are trained on is just snapshots of human knowledge. a microscopic window of the limited reports on human experience which are themselves microscopic reports of a human’s lifetime.
because it literally can’t innovate.
I was with you 100% until this. “Innovation” is super easy. It will always be easy to extrapolate new things from existing things. People just over-romanticize “innovation” as some kind of magic.
I think chances are good that human produced newness will be on average more useful, complete and safe.
It will always be easy to extrapolate new things from existing things
I don’t think that’s the case at all. Recombining existing things is interpolation, creating new stuff that is both novel and also interesting or valuable, is a completely different task
All new things are just existing things put together or modified very slightly.
People talk about iphones being this moment of ingenuous creation, but we already had phones, mobile phones, webcams, texting, predictive text, applications, touch screens, mobile web browsers, mobile games, video calling, etc. Even the concept was fairly well-trod in fiction. There was literally new about the first smartphone.
A hafted spear is an incredible innovation, but we already had fully wooden spears, sharp rocks, string and adhesive resins before we put them together. Like a smart phone, that tool opens up new options and lifeways that weren’t viable before, though not a single input is new.
What is the state of SC2 bots vs humans nowadays?
AlphaStar plays at GM level after some nerfs.
