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The 'creepy Facebook AI' story that captivated the media

bbc.com

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Re: The 'creepy Facebook AI' story that captivated the media

#41

Post by jacquesm »

adityab wrote: post #11

This 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…

> I saw comments by lots of genuinely afraid laypeople who were producing platitudes to the effect that scientists don't have common sense, that we're "playing god"...

We have the same here on HN, see some of the comments in this thread:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14877920

The fear mongering is reaching pretty high levels.

Re: The 'creepy Facebook AI' story that captivated the media

#44

Post by schoen »

MichaelMoser123 wrote: post #43
wonder_bread wrote: post #21

Seems like a tactful play by FB to promote their efforts by letting this 'event' leak out to the press

And the press is searching for stories, it's August and lot of newsmakers are out for vacations...

A longstanding tradition: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Silly_season

Re: The 'creepy Facebook AI' story that captivated the media

#45

Post by jo78p »

adityab wrote: post #11

This 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 don't have too. The sewing machine was invented a hundred years ago and it's inventors factory was burnt down and he was chased out of town. But everyone eventually came around. Fast. Same goes for anything else. Dumb people will do dumb things. Our professional reactor class will react for their upvotes/likes/retweets and viewcounts. But progress doesn't give a shit as the sewing machine tells us.

Re: The 'creepy Facebook AI' story that captivated the media

#46

Post by oliv__ »

spyspy wrote: post #3

Makes 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…

My question (might be dumb, I don't know much about ML) here is: how do you know that the bots are actually understanding each other as opposed to just sending each other utter gibberish and responding like everything is fine?

In other words, how do you determine that there is meaning in a conversation spoken in a language you don't understand?

Re: The 'creepy Facebook AI' story that captivated the media

#47

Post by [deleted] »

adityab wrote: post #11

This 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…

[deleted]

Re: The 'creepy Facebook AI' story that captivated the media

#48

Post by chillee »

mrec wrote: post #5
spyspy wrote: post #3

Makes 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: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cryptophasia

Wow the linked article is quite something:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/June_and_Jennifer_Gibbons

> According to Wallace, the girls had a longstanding agreement that if one died, the other must begin to speak and live a normal life. During their stay in the hospital, they began to believe that it was necessary for one of them to die, and after much discussion, Jennifer agreed to be the sacrifice.[4] In March 1993, the twins were transferred from Broadmoor to the more open Caswell Clinic in Bridgend, Wales; on arrival Jennifer could not be roused.[5] She was taken to the hospital where she died soon after of acute myocarditis, a sudden inflammation of the heart.[5] There was no evidence of drugs or poison in her system, and her death remains a mystery.[6] At the inquest, June revealed that Jennifer had been acting strangely for about a day before their release, her speech was slurring, and she said that she was dying. On the trip to Caswell, she had slept in June's lap with her eyes open.[3][7] On a visit a few days later, Wallace recounted that June "was in a strange mood". She said, "I'm free at last, liberated, and at last Jennifer has given up her life for me".[5]

Re: The 'creepy Facebook AI' story that captivated the media

#49

Post by j9461701 »

bduerst wrote: post #23
adityab wrote: post #11

This 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.

I think typical, reasonable people do fall for this stuff, though not because they're scared. They fall for it because it's all they ever hear about the issue.

Even the smartest of us can't know everything, and so if all you ever hear about say... IQ tests is "They're bunk, they don't test anything, they're gibberish, they're just an excuse for ivory tower academics to feel better than us" - it becomes a part of your natural understanding of the world, which you don't even think to question. The lies become part of the cultural fabric, and indistinguishable from truth without conducting your own research on what the scientists are actually saying. What you don't know you don't know is the most dangerous stuff of all.

Re: The 'creepy Facebook AI' story that captivated the media

#50

Post by digi_owl »

chillee wrote: post #48
mrec wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> You can achieve the same thing with two young children that spend a lot of time together e.g. twins. Sometimes taken to extremes: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cryptophasia

Wow the linked article is quite something: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/June_and_Jennifer_Gibbons > According to Wallace, the girls had a longstanding agreement that if one died, the other must begin to speak and live a normal life. During their stay in the hospital, they began to believe that it was necessary for one of them to die, and after much discussion, Jennifer agreed to be the sacrifice.[4] In March 1993, t…

So one of them actually willed herself to die?!
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