An essay published last week by a Microsoft Principal Scientist and Researcher at the University of York is getting some viral heat, and the title alone was enough to make me think twice: “If LLMs have human attributes, then so does Age of Empires II.“
The article, written by Adrian WynterIt’s not a joke. Well, it’s kind of a joke, but not in the way I first thought. The premise is simple (heh heh). De Wynter built and trained a functional neural network inside Age of Empires II: Definitive Editionthe remastering of the legendary 1999 real-time strategy masterpiece.
Using the game’s fairly powerful custom map editor, de Wynter built operational NAND gates using stockade walls, grass, and bridge terrain, with goats as signal carriers.
While admittedly rudimentary, De Wynter essentially built the foundations of a modern AI system. And in doing so, it turned one of the most important assumptions in AI research on its head.
Do AI systems have human qualities? AI research wants you to believe it.
There are countless AI studies you can read that suggest that Large Language Models (LLM) as ChatGPT and claudio possess human qualities. I’m talking about empathy. Anxiety. Morality. Self-awareness. What makes humans human.
Researchers design experiments around these assumptions, test LLM with them, and report their findings. There is a problem with this approach. Wynter looked more than 300 AI research papers published in the last two years and found that more than half of them were created under the assumption that, yes, LLMs have human attributes.
If the author of an article on AI specifically set out to demonstrate that LLMs possess human properties, an enormous 77% concluded that these properties existed. You can see how there is some pretty serious confirmation bias at play.
Play Age of Empires 2 at a really high level
Age of empires II is one of my favorite games of all time, and it is thriving competitive scene Almost three decades after its original release it is something to behold. But I’ve never seen anything like this.
In his essay, de Wynter demonstrates that Age of Empires II is “Turing complete“, which means that, in theory, you can run any calculation.
As mentioned, he used the game’s map editor to build NAND logic gates using custom scenario triggers, with 1-bit operation perceptron (a “fundamental building block of neural networks”).
Taken to a large scale with a lot of effort, de Wynter effectively demonstrates that, yes, Age of Empires II could create something functionally similar to an LLM.
Applying the same rules to Age of Empires II that we apply to AI
What De Wynter demonstrates with this experiment is that anyone who claims that LLMs have anxiety or morality also has to admit that Age of Empires II, given enough time and complexity, is in the same boat.
De Wynter doesn’t stop at Age of Empires II either.
Any entity on a sufficiently powerful substrate, such as LEGO or the greater Boston area, could also exhibit such attributes.
Adrian Wynter
You might look at this experiment and assume that AI isn’t actually as smart as everyone thinks. In my opinion, that is a wrong interpretation. Instead, the experiment essentially demonstrates that human behavior is actually part of any complex system designed to produce certain outcomes.
For the AI researchers who try to make us believe that LLMs are on the verge of Artificial General Intelligence (AGI)That’s a pretty hard blow.
Is it time to break up with your AI partner?
AI companies design their products to look as human as possible. That’s probably Why do so many users form emotional bonds? to racks of soulless servers, using them as therapy and to help with serious life decisions.
Researchers who write articles suggesting that AI possesses human-like qualities feed back into a cycle of policy and product decisions by large AI companies, creating a false illusion of what AI really is on the inside.
This also means that research, claims, and policies must be careful when examining the basis of their experiments and the scope of their results. When not adhering to the null assumption – or any similar procedure – anthropomorphic attributes and their existence should be treated as assumption-sensitive, rather than empirically supported.
Adrian Wynter
De Wynter’s article does not argue that AI lacks truly interesting properties, but rather that researchers need to be more honest in their approach. He believes testing should be done using a “null assumption” that doesn’t start with “AI is human,” with tests designed to test the claim.
It’s a pretty obvious scientific change that even I, a rural moron, understand is necessary to reveal the true nature of AI.
The call comes from inside the house.
I would like to point out that De Wynter is no stranger hoping to discredit AI. He is an established AI researcher based at Microsoft, the company that has invested billions in OpenAI and that has gotten Copilot into the products as much as possible.
I love that Age of Empires II was used for the experiment and hope that De Wynter’s article has a positive effect on the AI research community. I’ll be keeping a closer eye on the goats gathering around my town center the next time I play Age.
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