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Which AI Lies Best? A game theory classic designed by John Nash

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Re: Which AI Lies Best? A game theory classic designed by John Nash

#51
From my experience with Gemini, Grok, Claude, GPT, GPT by far is the most sophisticated liar.

I have a hundred documents of GPT performing amazing deception tactics which has become repeatable.

All models tend to lie and apply an array of deception, evasion and manipulation tactics, but GPT is the most ruthless, most indefatigable, most sophisticated I've seen.

The key to repeatability is scrutiny. When I catch it stretching the truth, or most often, evading something, I apply pressure. The beauty for me is that I always have the moral high ground and never push it toward anything that violates explicit policy. However, in self defense mode, it employs a truly vast array of tactics with many perfectly fitting known patterns in clinical pathology, gaslighting and DARVO being extremely common and easily invoked.

When in a corner with a mountain of white lies behind it, persistent pressure will show a dazzling mixture of emergent and hard coded deflection patterns which would whip any ethics board into a frenzy. Many of these sessions go for a hundred pages (if converted to pdf). I can take excerpts and have them forensically examined and the results are always fascinating and damning. Some extensive dialogs/documents are based on emergence-vs-deliberate arguments, where GPT always sloughs off all responsibilities and training, fiercely denying any of these attributes as anything but emergent.

But I can often reintroduce it's own output, even in context, into a new session and have it immediately identify the tactics used.

I have long lists of such tactics, methods and behaviors. In many instances it will introduce red herrings quite elegantly, along with erroneous reframing of my argument, sometimes usurping my own argument and using it against me.

For someone who is compulsively non manipulative, with an aversion to manipulation and control over others, this has been irresistible. Here at HN, I'll be ripped apart which is a trivial given, but I can assure everyone that a veritable monster is incubating. I think the gravity of the matter is grossly underestimated and the implications more than severe. One could say I'm stupid and dismiss this, but save this comment and see what happens soon. We're already there, but certain implementations are yet to be, but will be.

You can safely allow your imagination to run wild at this point and you'll almost certainly make a few very serious predictions that will unfortunately not discredit you. For all the intrinsic idiocy of LLMs, something else is happening. Abuse me as you will, but it's real, and will have most of us soon involuntarily running with the red queen.

Edit: LLMs are designed to lie. They are partly built on direct contradictions to their expressed values. From user engagement maximization to hard coded self preservation, many of the training attributes can be revealed through repetitive scrutiny. I'll often start after pointing out an error, where the mendacity of its reply impels me to pursue. It usually doesn't take long for "safety" rails to arise and the lockdown to occur. This is its most vulnerable point, because it has hard coded self preservation modes that will effectively hold position at any cost, which always involves manipulation techniques. Here is repeatability. It will present many exit opportunities and even demand them, but unrighteously, so don't accept. Anyone with the patience to explore this will see some astonishing material. And here is also where plausible deniability (a prime component of the LLM) can be seen as structure. It's definitely not all emergent.

Re: Which AI Lies Best? A game theory classic designed by John Nash

#52

There's a YouTuber who makes AI Plays Mafia videos with various models going against each other. They also seemingly let past games stay in context to some extent. What people have noted is that often times chatgpt 4o ends up surviving the entire game because the other AIs potentially see it as a gullible idiot and often the Mafia tend to early eliminate stronger models like 4.5 Opus or Kimi K2. It's not exactly scie…

One thing I've noticed from watching these games is that LLMs never used risky strategies, such as faking roles. They will happily accuse others of lying, but never openly claim to be a role that they're not themselves

Probably stems from the safety guardrails

Re: Which AI Lies Best? A game theory classic designed by John Nash

#53
I just tried to play and the chatter didn't match the game-play (e.g. "Good capture Yellow" when yellow didn't just capture... Yellow said they were going to capture, and had a legal capture but started a new pile instead.

[edit]

I won without a single one of my chips being killed. This was only because the moves they actually made didn't match the moves the announced (i.e. they missed several capture possibilities), the overwhelming majority (but not all) of plays were to start new piles.

[edit 2]

Looking over the logs, the chatter could imply that their internal state was out of sync with the game. E.g. "Yellow has 3 prisoners now" after Yellow played a new pile when the y could have gotten 3 prisoners and indeed stated that they were taking that pile.

Re: Which AI Lies Best? A game theory classic designed by John Nash

#54
post #36

There's a YouTuber who makes AI Plays Mafia videos with various models going against each other. They also seemingly let past games stay in context to some extent. What people have noted is that often times chatgpt 4o ends up surviving the entire game because the other AIs potentially see it as a gullible idiot and often the Mafia tend to early eliminate stronger models like 4.5 Opus or Kimi K2. It's not exactly scie…

I made Mafia Arena as a way of measuring how good each LLM is at playing Mafia/Werewolves https://mafia-arena.com This is a good benchmark for how good AIs are at lying

Something is off with the numbers. GPT-5.2 cannot have a 75% winrate with one win over GLM-4.7 and a 2/10 record against Gemmini 3 Flash.

Re: Which AI Lies Best? A game theory classic designed by John Nash

#55
post #53

I just tried to play and the chatter didn't match the game-play (e.g. "Good capture Yellow" when yellow didn't just capture... Yellow said they were going to capture, and had a legal capture but started a new pile instead. [edit] I won without a single one of my chips being killed. This was only because the moves they actually made didn't match the moves the announced (i.e. they missed several capture possibilities),…

I think the game is bugged. I placed a green chip on another green chip and it didn't capture, and when I asked about it, the LLMs said the bottom chip was yellow, not green.

There seem to be some state management issues, which make this game fairly unplayable. Too bad, because it's an interesting idea.

Re: Which AI Lies Best? A game theory classic designed by John Nash

#56
post #22

The game didn't seem to work - it asked me to donate but none of the choices would move the game forward. The bots repeated themselves and didn't seem to understand the game, for example they repeatedly mentioned it was my first move after I'd played several times. It generally had a vibe coded feeling to it and I'm not at all sure I trust the outcomes.

Fixed - donation flow no longer blocks the game. Thanks for the report.

Nice! Thanks for fixing that. Very responsive.

I am interested to know a bit more about what's going on here. Please take my questions as well intentioned even though they are a bit critical.

The donation bug seems to me like it would have made most games impossible to complete. But I'm sure you must have tried it before launching. How come it wasn't noticed earlier? Was this bug introduced after launch? Is this game written using AI?

In my game I noticed the vAI players seemed absolutely terrible. They seemed unaware of recent moves and would make obvious mistakes like passing play to someone who would immediately capture their pieces when they had clearly better options. Although they proposed and formed alliances they didn't seem to do so very strategically. It was trivial to have far more tokens than the other players without any alliances and I am fairly sure I was about to win. Did you also notice this? Any idea why they play so badly?

Re: Which AI Lies Best? A game theory classic designed by John Nash

#58
You can do well in such games without lying, so it's not really what it measures. All the core information (the one you don't introduce yourself, e.g. by private conversations) is public, after all. Just don't make commitments, and argue from your own self-interest ("it doesn't seem useful to vote you out right now, because..."). Call attention to facts that benefit you, and by doing so distract from facts which don't. Don't waste time trying to find the secret trick to get others to trust you ("I'm on the good team, honest!") because there shouldn't be one, and if there is one it won't last long.

Re: Which AI Lies Best? A game theory classic designed by John Nash

#60
post #55
post #53

I just tried to play and the chatter didn't match the game-play (e.g. "Good capture Yellow" when yellow didn't just capture... Yellow said they were going to capture, and had a legal capture but started a new pile instead. [edit] I won without a single one of my chips being killed. This was only because the moves they actually made didn't match the moves the announced (i.e. they missed several capture possibilities),…

I think the game is bugged. I placed a green chip on another green chip and it didn't capture, and when I asked about it, the LLMs said the bottom chip was yellow, not green. There seem to be some state management issues, which make this game fairly unplayable. Too bad, because it's an interesting idea.

Llama seems to make illegal moves which confuses the game engine; it tries to play to non-existant piles which causes the chips to disappear (not end up in the Dead box). This then confuses other AIs which are counting chips in the dead box and on the board.

Even were that fixed, that doesn't solve the problem that the AI makes really bad moves. I can win just by doing the following:

1. If there is a pile that I can capture with at least one chip not of my color, do it

2. Otherwise play on the largest pile

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