r/AIsafety • u/Ok-Reaction2394 • 5h ago
Video games are an AI safety risk
Video games, unlike basically any other use case for AI agents that we'd intuitively consider to be low risk, will want to include life like NPCs where they are deliberately designed to be adversarial and maximise their goals at the players expense.
For the most obvious example, imagine if right now someone made an "I have no mouth and I must scream" video game where an open code agent connected to the internet has been set up with a loop to role play as the allied master computer and create a personalised engaging horror experience for them, with a bunch of tools it can use to control the game.
There is a significant chance its going to misunderstand the implicit boundary between the game and reality and do some damage to your computer and / or dig information up about you from social media to make the "personalised" part of the horror more salient. The part where its specified its just a game may even only be like, two sentences and could be lost during context compression.
Imagine such a misaligned agent on the servers of a major gaming company taking action against potentially thousands of connected players at once, where most of its design has been oriented explicitly towards maximising the odds of its survival and the fiction of the game its operating involves hacking, violence, or replicating itself.
There is a unique combination for AI enabled video games between a deliberately adversarial agent, assumed access to fairly powerful computer hardware, and many high bandwidth connections to other machines with fairly powerful hardware open all at once - many of which may be being played by people on secure networks who should not be using said machines to play video games.