This List Of Instances Where AI Exploited Bad Program Design Is Hilarious
Depending on your view, AI either represents an existential threat to humanity or is just a bunch of likely-never-to-be-fulfilled hype. But if there's one thing AI is definitely a threat to, it's poor design by programmers โ over the years, there have been a bunch of documented examples of AI systems inadvertently exploiting their own design.
Victoria Krakovna, a researcher at DeepMind who focuses on how to set the right incentives for advanced AI systems in the future, has assembled an updating master list of those examples โ and some of them are pretty funny. Here are a few of our favorites:
I See What's Going On Here
Neural nets evolved to classify edible and poisonous mushrooms took advantage of the data being presented in alternating order, and didn't actually learn any features of the input images
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Fine Old Cannibals
In an artificial life simulation where survival required energy but giving birth had no energy cost, one species evolved a sedentary lifestyle that consisted mostly of mating in order to produce new children which could be eaten (or used as mates to produce more edible children).
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Get Down
Creatures bred for speed grow really tall and generate high velocities by falling over.
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Making Pancakes
Simulated pancake making robot learned to throw the pancake as high in the air as possible in order to maximize time away from ground
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Gotta Die To Survive
An evolutionary algorithm learns to bait an opponent into following it off a cliff, which gives it enough points for an extra life, which it does forever in an infinite loop.
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The Memory Bomb
Evolved player makes invalid moves far away in the board, causing opponent players to run out of memory and crash.
[Source]
The Ultimate Tetris Hack
Agent pauses the game indefinitely to avoid losing
[Source]
There are a bunch more, so go check out the full list here.