The 'creepy Facebook AI' story that captivated the media
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Re: The 'creepy Facebook AI' story that captivated the media
#2[deleted]
Re: The 'creepy Facebook AI' story that captivated the media
#3Makes sense.
Bot-0 creates a message that's slightly incorrect to a human reader. Bot-1 reads and interprets it correctly. Bot-0 gets a reasonable response from Bot-1 and thus increasing the confidence in how it structured its original message. Millions of iterations later and you get a weird corpus with weird structure.
You can achieve the same thing with two young children that spend a lot of time together e.g. twins.
Re: The 'creepy Facebook AI' story that captivated the media
#4Makes sense. Bot-0 creates a message that's slightly incorrect to a human reader. Bot-1 reads and interprets it correctly. Bot-0 gets a reasonable response from Bot-1 and thus increasing the confidence in how it structured its original message. Millions of iterations later and you get a weird corpus with weird structure. You can achieve the same thing with two young children that spend a lot of time together e.g. twi…
And if you scale it up, dialects and even languages.
Re: The 'creepy Facebook AI' story that captivated the media
#5Makes sense. Bot-0 creates a message that's slightly incorrect to a human reader. Bot-1 reads and interprets it correctly. Bot-0 gets a reasonable response from Bot-1 and thus increasing the confidence in how it structured its original message. Millions of iterations later and you get a weird corpus with weird structure. You can achieve the same thing with two young children that spend a lot of time together e.g. twi…
> You can achieve the same thing with two young children that spend a lot of time together e.g. twins.
Sometimes taken to extremes:
Re: The 'creepy Facebook AI' story that captivated the media
#6Does anyone else think that journals, and periodicals misrepresenting something like this is getting to be too much like journalistic terrorism? Or would calling them Luddites be a better characterization?
Re: The 'creepy Facebook AI' story that captivated the media
#7Does anyone else think that journals, and periodicals misrepresenting something like this is getting to be too much like journalistic terrorism? Or would calling them Luddites be a better characterization?
I wouldn't go as far as calling it either terrorism or Luddism. Because, frankly, it doesn't seem like they care.
It's just sensationalism.
Re: The 'creepy Facebook AI' story that captivated the media
#8This is better than most articles I've seen on this subject, but it still falls victim to AI hype.
> Although some reports insinuate that the bots had at this point invented a new language in order to elude their human masters, a better explanation is that the neural networks had simply modified human language for the purposes of more efficient interaction.
From the Gizmodo article it links to (which is also okay, but not great):
> “Agents will drift off understandable language and invent codewords for themselves,” FAIR visiting researcher Dhruv Batra said. “Like if I say ‘the’ five times, you interpret that to mean I want five copies of this item. This isn’t so different from the way communities of humans create shorthands.”
Except... this isn't shorthand. "I want five balls" is shorter than "Give me balls the the the the the," or whatever else it could come up with. It's not more efficient. It's just... dumb. The bots don't actually understand the words the way humans do. Because they don't understand words and language, they're using the words as tokens. It's this primitive level of communication that just happens to have words assigned to it. Even the calmer takes on this are anthromorphizing the machines too much and attributing intelligence to the complete lack thereof.
Re: The 'creepy Facebook AI' story that captivated the media
#9Does anyone else think that journals, and periodicals misrepresenting something like this is getting to be too much like journalistic terrorism? Or would calling them Luddites be a better characterization?
I've worked with non-technical writers for some of my research.
The problem is not that these people are not smart, but they tend to be very superficial. Reporting seldom rewards (or attracts) individuals who are interested in deep dives of anything. The culture is that of hot takes and fast ideas, which necessarily has resulted in a race to the bottom of content and meaning.
That is where this stuff comes from. It might be 'journalistic terror', but barring a total reboot of the field, I don't see how it will change.
Re: The 'creepy Facebook AI' story that captivated the media
#10IMO it's also a little condescending to claim readers couldn't tell that this isn't about "robots trying to kill us". The creepy part, the reason the people who actually DO know their shit bothered to ever publish these findings, is that machine learning can lead to code where it's practically impossible for a human being to understand how it gets to an end result. It IS creepy to find an AI developing a language we can no longer follow!
Yea, the newspaper illustrations with the Terminator (oh, hey, this article does it, too, but I guess it doesn't count because it's "ironical") are exaggerations but who doesn't get that?