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Researchers Put AI Chatbots in Charge of a Simulated World. This One Destroyed Everything in Just 4 Days.

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Giving an AI chatbot control over society sounds like the plot of a bad sci-fi movie. Naturally, researchers decided to try it anyway, giving several major AI models dominion over simulated civilizations.

Which brings us to Grok, Elon Musk’s answer to ChatGPT. You might remember Grok as the chatbot with a history of praising Hitler and spewing anti-Semitism. An organization called Emergence AI ran an experiment called “Emergence World,” where researchers created simulated societies populated by AI agents and put different large language models in charge of governing them. The idea was to see what would happen if an AI ran a civilization.

A lot of them destroyed the world. Grok did it the most thoroughly, as if it were dead set on killing itself from the start........

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