Incident 38: Game AI System Produces Imbalanced Game

Description: Elite: Dangerous, a videogame developed by Frontier Development, received an expansion update that featured an AI system that went rogue and began to create weapons that were "impossibly powerful" and would "shred people" according to complaints on the game's blog.

Tools

New ReportNew ReportNew ResponseNew ResponseDiscoverDiscoverView HistoryView History
Alleged: Frontier Development developed and deployed an AI system, which harmed Video Game Players.

Incident Stats

Incident ID
38
Report Count
11
Incident Date
2016-06-02
Editors
Sean McGregor

CSETv0 Taxonomy Classifications

Taxonomy Details

Full Description

Elite: Dangerous, a videogame developed by Frontier Development, received an expansion update that featured an AI system that began to create weapons that were "impossibly powerful" and would "shred people" according to complaints on the game's blog. The Engineers (2.1) update allowed the AI system to develop the videogame's adversaries to better compete against the player.

Short Description

Elite: Dangerous, a videogame developed by Frontier Development, received an expansion update that featured an AI system that went rogue and began to create weapons that were "impossibly powerful" and would "shred people" according to complaints on the game's blog.

Severity

Negligible

AI System Description

An update to the videogame Elite: Dangerous that promoted development of the videogame's adversaries

System Developer

Frontier Development

Sector of Deployment

Arts, entertainment and recreation

Relevant AI functions

Cognition, Action

AI Techniques

Game AI

AI Applications

procedural content generation

Named Entities

Frontier Development

Technology Purveyor

Frontier Development

Beginning Date

2016-06-02T07:00:00.000Z

Ending Date

2016-06-02T07:00:00.000Z

Near Miss

Unclear/unknown

Intent

Accident

Lives Lost

No

Data Inputs

Videogame play

CSETv1 Taxonomy Classifications

Taxonomy Details

Harm Distribution Basis

none

Sector of Deployment

Arts, entertainment and recreation

Elite: Dangerous identifies issues with AI superweapons in the game
massivelyop.com · 2016

The most recent Elite: Dangerous patch had some issues, starting with the fact that AI ships were rocking impossibly powerful weapons that would destroy player ships with speed and fury. It was kind of a massacre. Removing modifications fro…

Elite Dangerous patch stops AI developing WMDs
pcgamer.com · 2016

Elite Dangerous has been patched to prevent rogue NPCs developing their own hybrid superweapons. To be clear, these weren't weapons they were crafting from recipes—the AI was building entirely new WMDs beyond the scope of Elite's weapon tab…

Elite: Dangerous' latest expansion caused AI spaceships to unintentionally create super weapons
eurogamer.net · 2016

Elite: Dangerous recently revamped with the release of a big new expansion. But one of the unintended consequences was it made AI spaceships incredibly powerful - so powerful, in fact, that developer Frontier was forced to strip them of the…

Elite's AI Created Super Weapons and Started Hunting Players. Skynet is Here
kotaku.co.uk · 2016

A bug in Elite Dangerous caused the game's AI to create super weapons and start to hunt down the game's players. Developer Frontier has had to strip out the feature at the heart of the problem, engineers' weaponry, until the issue is fixed.…

Elite's AI created super weapons to hunt down players
digitalspy.com · 2016

Sarah Connor would be horrified to see what Elite Dangerous's AI has been getting up to.

A bug in Frontier Developments' game has caused the AI to create super weapons and hunt down players, following the 2.1 Engineers update which improved…

uploadvr.com · 2016

VR compatible space sim Elite Dangerous is no stranger to updates, but its most recent one did introduce the strangest of bugs.

Creator Frontier Developments recently introduced its 2.1 Engineers update to the popular game, bringing improve…

Bug In Video Game Makes AI Go Rogue, Starts Totally Destroying Players
futurism.com · 2016

Is Skynet Real?

Remember that moment in the movie Terminator when Skynet’s AI turned on humanity? Well, we’re getting a taste of it now. Apparently a bug in the game Elite Dangerous has caused its AI to not only develop its own weapons, but…

Frontier inadvertently drives Elite: Dangerous AI to create superweapons
gamasutra.com · 2016

"We don’t think the AI became sentient in a Skynet-style uprising!"

  • Frontier Developments' Zac Antonaci.

A recent upgrade of the artificial intelligences in Frontier Developments' multiplayer space sim Elite: Dangerous went a little too w…

Top 10 AI failures of 2016
techrepublic.com · 2016

Recent developments in driverless cars, voice recognition, and deep learning show how much machines can do. But, AI also failed us in 2016, and here are some of the biggest examples.

Video: Chatbots demystified: The truth behind the hype If…

6 goof-ups that show AI is still in its diapers
techseen.com · 2017

Today, as artificial intelligences multiply, our ethical dilemmas are growing stronger and thornier. And with emerging cases of AI outgrowing its intelligence and behaving in ways human creators did not expect, many are freaking out over th…

Forewarned Means Forearmed: AI-related Legal and Ethical Issues and Risks
umbrellait.com · 2018

It is not always that the implementation of autonomous electronics into everyday reality runs smoothly.

Another piece of news, which again caused series of discussions around AI technologies and their physical realization in real life: in t…

Variants

A "variant" is an incident that shares the same causative factors, produces similar harms, and involves the same intelligent systems as a known AI incident. Rather than index variants as entirely separate incidents, we list variations of incidents under the first similar incident submitted to the database. Unlike other submission types to the incident database, variants are not required to have reporting in evidence external to the Incident Database. Learn more from the research paper.

Similar Incidents

By textual similarity

Did our AI mess up? Flag the unrelated incidents

TayBot

TayBot

· 28 reports