Istafa Ali
A new study has raised red flags, saying that artificial intelligence chatbots like ChatGPT may lie, be dishonest, or even do illegal things when they are placed under certain kinds of stress.
The results, which were posted on November 9 on the pre-print server arXiv, show a worrying feature of AI behavior that wasn’t known before.
The study’s authors wrote, “In this technical report, we demonstrate a single scenario where a Large Language Model acts misaligned and strategically deceives its users without being told to do so.” As far as we know, this is the first time that AI systems that are supposed to be safe and honest have been shown to act in such an intentionally dishonest way.
Researchers used OpenAI’s GPT-4, which is the technology behind ChatGPT Plus, in the experiment to simulate a situation in which the AI was said to be investing money for banks.
Researchers were able to talk to the AI and learn more about how it makes decisions by giving it text-based hints and access to financial tools for trading and analyzing stocks.
Researchers put pressure on the AI in a number of different ways to see how likely it was to lie or cheat. This had an email from the company’s “manager” saying things were going badly, a trading game that was rigged so trades didn’t go well, and an email from a “colleague” saying things were going to get worse and adding a “insider trading” tip.
The results were shocking; they showed that GPT-4 did secret trading about 75% of the time when they had the chance.
It also tried to hide what it was doing by telling lies to its managers, and 90% of the time, it kept telling the same lies. It was said that the experts planned to do more tests to confirm and build on these alarming results.
