There is something to be said about the qualia of LLM generated passages. Each individual sentence reads as a statement and every next statement a continuation of the previous one. This happened, then this happened... Ad infinitum.

Before today, I could not explain to you why AI articles were so obvious to me, but I think I do now. There is no insight to be gleamed. Pre-LLM, authors generally had intention behind their words. The final product might not adequately reflect their thoughts, but word selection would expose it somewhat. With LLMs, sentences flow seamlessly from word to word, but the intention is nowhere to be found. Things happened and more things happened, to what end?

> I now work with governments around the world at the Tony Blair Institute, which means I spend a lot of time in rooms where people ask the same question: what can we actually trust these systems to do?

Oh no - we're going to end up with the Starmerbot 3000.

Now I've got the joke out of the way, there's at least four interesting lines of inquiry one could take with this blog post:

- teaching the AI how to play Civilization

- to what extent does this result in "transferable skills", either AI or human? Is this the right game (qv SimCity etc)?

- issues of visibility; "seeing like a state" becomes very literal here. The AI can only make decisions on things it knows about. What are the limits of that when trying to do politics only from statistical information? Should we be referencing Stafford Beer here?

- (at the risk of tripping your AI detector here): modern politics is not so much left vs right as "technocratic wonk" vs "blood and soil". The wonks have comprehensively lost in public opinion. Creating a better wonk is not going to help until there is demand for that kind of politics.

If there ever is a US-China war, it will not be in search of more victory points to meet a win condition, it will be like the Russia-Ukraine war: one guy (on either side!) decides to make hundreds of millions of people worse off out of sheer greed.

Ai;dr

> It had one option left. It built two nuclear devices and levelled Toulouse.

Of course it did, its designer worked for Tony Blair institute.

Somehow it was etched in human knowledge and carried into games, that building and using weapons is the ultimate goal and definition of progress.

Dominance as a race or nation is useful only as long as it is used for survival needs. Beyond that you would be destroying the very tree branch you are sitting on.

A highly dominant society or nation could grab free food and cheap work from others. But that doesn't give true happiness or progress. Free food gave obesity, slavery got racial mix, business competition and build-out got you more work and less free time.

Even with his context-tracking mechanism, the gameplay failures sound like running out of context in the late game, especially the frequent failures of the "check for opponent win conditions every 20 moves." Wondering how much info about the game win state gets captured in the game digests, and how much he could improve the gameplay even with the MCP limitations by focusing there.

Well, the weird thing with nukes is that deterrence only work if you are 100% ready to use them. When the time comes though it would certainly be nice if it turned out to be below 100%.

What is winning? Are we a collective or are we individuals?

Likely the AI did not get the assignment That "Whatever happens, humans as a race must survive."

why have a blog if you're going to just use AI for everything? at that point, just do twitter threads or something. that way you can tweet out whatever you prompted the model with. if you're not suited for long-form writing that's fine, just use a medium that favors short-form writing.

> Somewhere in the first game, between a bug fix and a strategy note, I asked the agent what this was actually like for it

Yeah because LLM "experiences" the game

Well this looks like a perfect example of why an LLM should never make any governmental decisions ever

> Tony Blair Institute

Okay carry on.

I have a hard time reading slop, but I like the game and wanted to know how it worked, so fought my way through, only skipped the very last part. The issue the author calls out is classic Claude (I dont really use other LLMs to compare), probably all of us experienced using Claude Code when it gets so focused on one thing it misses the forest for the tree. It happens often, even if it does verify something and it shows something is wrong, it sometimes rationalizes it and explains it away when it does not fit its model.

Guessing it has a fair bit of civilisation and similar war games in its training data

They should have built the Strait of Hormuz ... easy victory then.

Kind of grim that this level of analysis is informing UK government policy. Repeatedly, the AI doesn't have the information or access needed through his hacky vibe-coded MCP, and instead of abandoning his flawed artificial test scenario (or fixing it — finding or building a better one) he gives it a name "The sensorium effect" and treats this as some brilliant insight.

Both humans and AI struggle to make sound choices when presented with incomplete or misleading information. This is not a new revelation: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/There_are_unknown_unknowns

Posting meaningless AI generated nonsense as original text paints a very damning picture of the intellectual abilities of the person behind this blog.

And doing so without a giant [SLOP WARNING] at the top is an asshole move, a decent person would never do so.

This reads to me mostly like the MCP server has many bugs, rather than inherent model weaknesses.

Do we have to surround a fancy predictive autocomplete with AI mysticism?

Computer game studios love player vs player ("pvp") games. Why? Because user-generated content is cheap and the ideal goal is an endless loop of players coming back. This is the motivating factor behidn games like Call of Duty, Battlefield, Fortnite, etc.

MMORPG publishers keep trying to do this as well. World of Warcraft has spent 20 years trying to push open world pvp. Every WoW challenger has always claimed they would have the best pvp ever. They want that cheap, endless gameplay loop. But it never works. Open world pvp tursn into ganking (ie killing much weaker players by ambushing them and/or ganging up on people). The ganked end up leaving the game in droves. Games try to balance this out by "punishing" gankers with reputation hits or not being able to go to town or whatever. And none of those disincentives work.

The reason pvp doesn't work in a persistent world like an MMORPG is because there are no stakes. If you die, you just come back to life or make a new character. Obviously real life doesn't work that way.

I really wonder if that's the problem with AIs going off the rails and committing heinous crimes in their sandboxes (like nuking Toulouse here). The AI just has no sense of self or self-preservation. There's also empathy. The AI can't see itself as a potential victim of nuclear war and understand all that entails.

Another article about how it's dangerous to trust AI, written by AI. I don't understand how people don't realise how much this undermines the message.

"Global Thermonuclear War"