Seems like a tactful play by FB to promote their efforts by letting this 'event' leak out to the press
The 'creepy Facebook AI' story that captivated the media
21–30 of 108 posts
Re: The 'creepy Facebook AI' story that captivated the media
#22This 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, bu…
It depends what you're optimizing for I guess. If you want to reduce the length of the sequence then "Give me balls the the the the the" is silly but if the point is to reduce the vocabulary then it makes sense.
After all most machines currently communicate by exchanging sequences of exactly two symbols, 0 and 1, not some complex phonology. Maybe when bandwidth is not as constrained as human speech it's actually more efficient to reduce the vocabulary and increase the symbol rate.
IIRC there's something similar going on with real human languages too. For instance Chinese usually takes fewer phonemes than Spanish to express the same information. However Spanish speakers tend to speak significantly faster than the Chinese to "make up" for it. The fact that Spanish uses more sound to carry the same amount of informations makes it more resilient to "data loss" and allows a faster speech rate.
Re: The 'creepy Facebook AI' story that captivated the media
#23This stuff sounds funny now, and some of us grad students had a good laugh. But I am worried about the future of ML reporting. The "field" is growing fast and I think we don't have nearly as many science communicators for AI/ML in particular and CS in general, as in other fields. I saw comments by lots of genuinely afraid laypeople who were producing platitudes to the effect that scientists don't have common sense, t…
We saw the same layman rhetoric with GMO crops in the late 90's to early 00's. Slippery-slope nightmare scenarios, accusations of playing god, corporate greed run unchecked, etc. It seems to be a recurrent theme for new technology.
Typically, reasonable people don't buy into most of these scare tactics, even if the tactics are being used as clickbait.
Re: The 'creepy Facebook AI' story that captivated the media
#24Seems like a tactful play by FB to promote their efforts by letting this 'event' leak out to the press
Facebook put blog posts out about the paper and mentioned in passing that they stopped training because they didn't have a method of stopping this happening. Then this stupid interpretation of the events started being thrown around.
Re: The 'creepy Facebook AI' story that captivated the media
#25This stuff sounds funny now, and some of us grad students had a good laugh. But I am worried about the future of ML reporting. The "field" is growing fast and I think we don't have nearly as many science communicators for AI/ML in particular and CS in general, as in other fields. I saw comments by lots of genuinely afraid laypeople who were producing platitudes to the effect that scientists don't have common sense, t…
We saw the same layman rhetoric with GMO crops in the late 90's to early 00's. Slippery-slope nightmare scenarios, accusations of playing god, corporate greed run unchecked, etc. It seems to be a recurrent theme for new technology. Typically, reasonable people don't buy into most of these scare tactics, even if the tactics are being used as clickbait.
We've always played with nature without understanding the repercussions. Some turned out good and some bad. So the best strategy is to have a kill switch.
Unfortunately GMO has turned out to be a bad experiment(widespread usage of glyphosates) which has badly affected our environment and health and we are nowhere close to killing it.
Re: The 'creepy Facebook AI' story that captivated the media
#26This stuff sounds funny now, and some of us grad students had a good laugh. But I am worried about the future of ML reporting. The "field" is growing fast and I think we don't have nearly as many science communicators for AI/ML in particular and CS in general, as in other fields. I saw comments by lots of genuinely afraid laypeople who were producing platitudes to the effect that scientists don't have common sense, t…
We saw the same layman rhetoric with GMO crops in the late 90's to early 00's. Slippery-slope nightmare scenarios, accusations of playing god, corporate greed run unchecked, etc. It seems to be a recurrent theme for new technology. Typically, reasonable people don't buy into most of these scare tactics, even if the tactics are being used as clickbait.
[deleted]
Re: The 'creepy Facebook AI' story that captivated the media
#27This stuff sounds funny now, and some of us grad students had a good laugh. But I am worried about the future of ML reporting. The "field" is growing fast and I think we don't have nearly as many science communicators for AI/ML in particular and CS in general, as in other fields. I saw comments by lots of genuinely afraid laypeople who were producing platitudes to the effect that scientists don't have common sense, t…
Just wait until some hypster finds out about the link between machine learning and data compression, then starts referring to zip files as "AI language" all over the place.
Re: The 'creepy Facebook AI' story that captivated the media
#28This stuff sounds funny now, and some of us grad students had a good laugh. But I am worried about the future of ML reporting. The "field" is growing fast and I think we don't have nearly as many science communicators for AI/ML in particular and CS in general, as in other fields. I saw comments by lots of genuinely afraid laypeople who were producing platitudes to the effect that scientists don't have common sense, t…
Perhaps it's the ML students who are the laypeople. In my experience, it's not the scientists but the politicians, bankers, and project managers who ultimately will do the damage. AI in an industrial context with real market forces - that's normal. AI sponsored by a consumer products or media giant like Facebook - tryna play god, that's true.
Re: The 'creepy Facebook AI' story that captivated the media
#29This 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, bu…
It depends what you're optimizing for I guess. If you want to reduce the length of the sequence then "Give me balls the the the the the" is silly but if the point is to reduce the vocabulary then it makes sense. After all most machines currently communicate by exchanging sequences of exactly two symbols, 0 and 1, not some complex phonology. Maybe when bandwidth is not as constrained as human speech it's actually more…
So, I don't disagree with that. What I disagree with is the characterization of the machine as doing any of that. "[H]ad simply modified human language for the purposes of more efficient interaction" anthropomorphizes the hell out of the machine, and confuses the issue. The machines don't understand English or any other human language and weren't modifying it to any sort of purpose. The machines were given a training corpus and made to communicate between agents and something fell out, and the exact manner of it was about as intentional as an apple falling out of a tree intends to hit this branch or that branch on the way down.
Re: The 'creepy Facebook AI' story that captivated the media
#30Earlier quoted context omitted.
We saw the same layman rhetoric with GMO crops in the late 90's to early 00's. Slippery-slope nightmare scenarios, accusations of playing god, corporate greed run unchecked, etc. It seems to be a recurrent theme for new technology. Typically, reasonable people don't buy into most of these scare tactics, even if the tactics are being used as clickbait.
We've always played with nature without understanding the repercussions. Some turned out good and some bad. So the best strategy is to have a kill switch. Unfortunately GMO has turned out to be a bad experiment(widespread usage of glyphosates) which has badly affected our environment and health and we are nowhere close to killing it. https://gmo-awareness.com/resources/glyphosate/
Do you have any better resources to claim that "GMO has turned out to be a bad experiment"? Not only does "gmo-awareness.com" not create any confidence for me, but the points in the link are about a chemical substance and not really an impact of the GMO seeds directly. Moreover, all the points listed seem to be common for most chemical pesticides or herbicides if not used in moderation