Ethics, Rules of Engagement, and AI: Neural Narrative Mapping Using Large Transformer Language Models

The problem of determining if a military unit has correctly understood an order and is properly executing on it is one that has bedeviled military planners throughout history. The advent of advanced language models such as OpenAI's GPT-series offers new possibilities for addressing this problem. This paper presents a mechanism to harness the narrative output of large language models and produce diagrams or "maps" of the relationships that are latent in the weights of such models as the GPT-3. The resulting "Neural Narrative Maps" (NNMs), are intended to provide insight into the organization of information, opinion, and belief in the model, which in turn provide means to understand intent and response in the context of physical distance. This paper discusses the problem of mapping information spaces in general, and then presents a concrete implementation of this concept in the context of OpenAI's GPT-3 language model for determining if a subordinate is following a commander's intent in a high-risk situation. The subordinate's locations within the NNM allow a novel capability to evaluate the intent of the subordinate with respect to the commander. We show that is is possible not only to determine if they are nearby in narrative space, but also how they are oriented, and what "trajectory" they are on. Our results show that our method is able to produce high-quality maps, and demonstrate new ways of evaluating intent more generally. N the 1979 motion picture Apocalypse Now, Captain Willard (played by Martin Sheen) is sent on a mission to assassinate Colonel Kurtz (played by Marlon Brando), a highly decorated officer who, in the words of the general authorizing the mission, has gone from "one of the most outstanding officers this country has ever produced" to someone "out there operating without any decent restraint, totally beyond the pale of any acceptable human conduct." The movie explores the paradoxes in war, where some illegal acts are embraced by the command structure, some tolerated, and some are to be terminated, "with extreme prejudice." Willard has to navigate these conflicts as he moves towards Kurtz' compound deep in Cambodia. Apocalypse Now provides an example of the difficulty that any intent-aware system must face in a military context [1]. Not only does the system need to determine if an order is being followed, it should also determine if the order itself is valid, so that the warriors implementing the order are not placed in ethical dilemmas. This is the goal that we attempt to address in this paper, with the concept of Neural Narrative Mapping (NNM). By placing narrative elements at coordinates in a virtual space, we can determine sophisticated relationships between concepts that go well beyond textual comparison.