The essay published last week a Microsoft Chief Scientist and Researcher at York University It’s getting a little viral and the headline alone made me do a double take: “If LLMs Have Human-Like Attributes, Age of Empires II.“
Newspaper, author Adrian de Wynterit’s not a joke. It’s kind of a joke, but not the one I first thought. The premise is simple (heh heh). De Wynter built and trained the neural network that works inside Age of Empires II: Definitive EditionIt is a remaster of the legendary 1999 real-time strategy masterpiece.
Using the game’s fairly powerful custom map editor, de Wynter built operational NAND gates using palisade walls, grass, and bridge areas where goats were signal carriers.
Admittedly primitive, however, de Wynter essentially laid the foundations of the modern AI system. In doing so, he turned one of the biggest assumptions in AI research on its head.
Do artificial intelligence systems have human qualities? That’s what AI research would have you believe.
There are countless AI studies out there that you can read Large Language Models (LLM) as ChatGPT and Claude has human characteristics. I’m talking about empathy. Anxiety. Morality. Self-awareness. Things that make a person human.
Researchers design experiments around these hypotheses, test LLMs with them, and report their findings. There is a problem with this approach. De Wynter looked More than 300 Research papers on artificial intelligence published in the last two years have discovered this more than half of these, yes, were created with the assumption that LLMs have human attributes.
If the author of the AI article specifically set out to prove that LLMs have human characteristics, great 77% concluded that those properties exist. You can see how there is some pretty serious confirmation bias at play.
Playing Age of Empires 2 at a really high level
Age of Empires II is one of my favorite games of all time and its burgeoning competitive scene nearly three decades since its original release is remarkable. But I have never seen anything like it.
De Wynter argues in his essay that Age of Empires II “Turing-completed,” meaning it can theoretically run any calculation.
As mentioned, he used the game’s map editor to build it NAND logic gates Using 1-bit custom scenario triggers that act perceptron (“the basic building block of neural networks”).
Taken with great effort, de Wynter effectively proves that, yes, Age of Empires II can create something functionally similar to LLM.
The same rules we apply to AI apply to Age of Empires II
De Wynter proves with this experiment that anyone who claims that LLMs have concerns or morals should admit that, given enough time and complexity, Age of Empires II is in the same boat.
De Wynter isn’t stopping with Age of Empires II either.
Any object on a strong enough substrate, such as LEGO or the Greater Boston Area, can also present such attributes.
Adrian de Wynter
Looking at this experiment, you might think that artificial intelligence is not really as smart as everyone thinks. In my view, this is the wrong approach. Rather, the experiment essentially proves that human-like behavior is actually part of any complex system designed to achieve certain results.
For AI researchers trying to convince us that LLMs are on the horizon Artificial General Intelligence (AGI)that’s a pretty heavy blow.
Time to break up with your AI partner?
AI firms are designing their products to feel as human as possible. Probably why so many users create emotional attachments soulless server racks, using them for therapy and helping with serious life decisions.
By writing papers suggesting that AI has human-like qualities, researchers feed into the product and policy decision-making loop of major AI firms, creating a false illusion of what AI is actually like inside.
It also means that research, claims, and policy must be careful when examining the foundations of their practice and the scope of their findings. Unless the null hypothesis – or any similar procedure – is adhered to, anthropomorphic attributes and their existence should be considered hypothesis-sensitive rather than empirically supported.
Adrian de Wynter
De Wynter’s paper argues not that artificial intelligence does not have truly interesting properties, but that researchers need to be more honest in their approach. He believes that tests should be conducted using a “null hypothesis” that doesn’t start with “AI is human” with tests designed to prove a claim.
This is a pretty obvious scientific shift that even I, the village idiot, understand is necessary to unlock the true nature of artificial intelligence.
The call comes from inside the house
I’d like to point out that de Wynter is no outsider hoping to discredit AI. He is a principal AI researcher at Microsoft OpenAI and that squeezed Copilot into products as much as possible.
I love that Age of Empires II is used for the experiment, and I hope that de Wynter’s paper will have a positive impact on the AI research community. Next time I play Age, I’ll take a closer look at the goats that gather around my town center.
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