An essay published last week by a Microsoft Principal Scientist and University of York Researcher is getting some viral heat, and the title alone was enough to make me do a double-take: “If LLMs Have Human-Like Attributes, Then So Does Age of Empires II.“
The paper, authored by Adrian de Wynter, is not a joke. Well, it’s sort of a joke, but not in the way I first thought. The premise is simple (heh heh). De Wynter built and trained a working neural network inside Age of Empires II: Definitive Edition, the remaster of 1999’s legendary real-time strategy masterpiece.
Using the game’s rather powerful custom map editor, de Wynter constructed operational NAND gates using palisade walls, grass, and bridge terrain, with goats as signal carriers.
While admittedly rudimentary, de Wynter essentially built the basics of a modern AI system. And by doing so, he flipped one of the biggest assumptions in AI research on its head.
Do AI systems have human qualities? AI research wants you to believe so.
There are countless AI studies out there that you can read suggesting that Large Language Models (LLMs) like ChatGPT and Claude possess human-like qualities. I’m talking about empathy. Anxiety. Morality. Self-awareness. The stuff that makes humans human.
Researchers design experiments around these assumptions, test LLMs with them, and report on their findings. There’s a problem with this approach. De Wynter looked at more than 300 AI research papers published in the last two years and discovered that more than half of them were created under the assumption that, yes, LLMs do have human attributes.
If an AI paper’s author specifically set out to prove that LLMs possess human properties, a whopping 77% concluded that those properties existed. You can see how there’s a rather serious confirmation bias at play.
Playing Age of Empires 2 at a truly high level
Age of Empires II is one of my favorite games of all time, and its thriving competitive scene nearly three decades after its original launch is something to behold. But I’ve never seen something like this.
In his essay, de Wynter proves that Age of Empires II is “Turing-complete,” which means it can theoretically run any computation.
As mentioned, he used the game’s map editor to build NAND logic gates using custom scenario triggers, with a functioning 1-bit perceptron (a “fundamental build block of neural networks”).
Taken to a grand scale with a lot of effort, de Wynter effectively proves that, yes, Age of Empires II could create something functionally similar to an LLM.
Applying the same rules to Age of Empires II as we apply to AI
What de Wynter proves with this experiment is that anyone claiming LLMs have anxiety or morals also has to admit that Age of Empires II, given enough time and complexity, is in the same boat.
De Wynter doesn’t stop at Age of Empires II, either.
Any entity in a sufficiently-powerful substrate, such as LEGO or the Greater Boston Area, could also present such attributes.
Adrian de Wynter
You might look at this experiment and assume that AI is actually not as smart as everyone thinks it is. In my eyes, that’s the wrong take. Instead, the experiment essentially proves that human-like behavior is actually a part of any complex system designed to produce certain results.
For AI researchers attempting to make us believe that LLMs are on the verge of Artificial General Intelligence (AGI), that’s a rather heavy blow.
Is it time to break up with your AI partner?
AI firms design their products to feel as human as possible. That’s probably why so many users form emotional attachments to soulless server racks, using them for therapy and to help with serious life decisions.
Researchers writing papers suggesting that AI possesses human-like qualities feed back into a loop of product and policy decisions from the big AI firms, creating a false illusion of what AI actually is on the inside.
This also means that research, claims, and policies should be careful on examining the bases for their experiments and the scope of the results. When not sticking to the null assumption–or any similar procedure–anthropomorphic attributes and their existence should be treated as assumption-sensitive, rather than empirically-supported.
Adrian de Wynter
De Wynter’s paper posits not that AI lacks truly interesting properties, but that researchers need to be more honest in their approach. He believes that tests should be performed using a “null assumption” that doesn’t start with “AI is human,” with tests designed to prove the claim.
It’s a pretty obvious scientific change that even I, a rural imbecile, understand is necessary to reveal the true nature of AI.
The call is coming from inside the house
I’d like to point out that de Wynter isn’t an outsider hoping to discredit AI. He’s an established AI researcher based at Microsoft, the company that has poured untold billions into OpenAI and that has jammed Copilot into products as much as possible.
I absolutely love that it’s Age of Empires II that was used for the experiment, and I hope that de Wynter’s paper has a positive effect on the AI research community. I’ll be keeping a closer eye on the goats gathered around my Town Center the next time I play some Age.
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