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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

#51

Post by throw2016 »

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…

These stories are usually pushed out to the media. Ideally AI researchers and startups would communicate more accurately about their current capabilities and how far away they are from anything resembling intelligence or sentience but it's easy to give in to excitement and speculate about possibilities and scenarios that are far away.

That could help but the media is diverse and you can stop the media misreporting, and AI is not the only affected area, as much as you can prevent hype.

The idea of AI has been the stuff of science fiction for decades so there is always some latent interest. Add to that some heavily promoted film or TV show that touches on these topics and the media frenzy and scare mongering hits peak again.

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

#52

Post by arjo1 »

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…

Perhaps a good layman type explanation would be that nueral networks are essentially curve fitting on steroids. (Hopefully at some point people have done curve fitting in school and remember drawing lines of best fit). Therefore the term AI is essentially a misnomer. I would even go as far as to emphasize that nueral networks are boring mathematical equations which do not actually mimic the inner workings of our brains.

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

#53

Post by shiftpgdn »

arjo1 wrote: post #52
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…

Perhaps a good layman type explanation would be that nueral networks are essentially curve fitting on steroids. (Hopefully at some point people have done curve fitting in school and remember drawing lines of best fit). Therefore the term AI is essentially a misnomer. I would even go as far as to emphasize that nueral networks are boring mathematical equations which do not actually mimic the inner workings of our brai…

I have a bachelor's degree and have no idea what curve fitting is.

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

#54

Post by schoen »

shiftpgdn wrote: post #53
arjo1 wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Perhaps a good layman type explanation would be that nueral networks are essentially curve fitting on steroids. (Hopefully at some point people have done curve fitting in school and remember drawing lines of best fit). Therefore the term AI is essentially a misnomer. I would even go as far as to emphasize that nueral networks are boring mathematical equations which do not actually mimic the inner workings of our brai…

I have a bachelor's degree and have no idea what curve fitting is.

You might have seen it called "regression" (also "interpolation" and "extrapolation"), but not everyone has necessarily been exposed to this.

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

#55

Post by schoen »

arjo1 wrote: post #52
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…

Perhaps a good layman type explanation would be that nueral networks are essentially curve fitting on steroids. (Hopefully at some point people have done curve fitting in school and remember drawing lines of best fit). Therefore the term AI is essentially a misnomer. I would even go as far as to emphasize that nueral networks are boring mathematical equations which do not actually mimic the inner workings of our brai…

Some recent HN discussion about neural networks vs. neurons:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14790673

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

#56

Post by computerex »

CamperBob2 wrote: post #20
blowski wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Seems like the same problem as nuclear power, GM foods, and just about every other new but complex technology. People don't understand it, and we always fear what we don't understand.

True, and it doesn't exactly help that respected people like Elon Musk are cranking up a lot of irrational FUD for reasons known only to themselves.

Lately, I think the attention is getting into Elon's head.. It's so unsettling because Elon was our lord and savior and now as if corrupted by his newly found fully grown hair, he has it seems given in to the media attention. Tesla, PayPal and SpaceX I can get behind. Hyperloop? AI neurolink thing? Wtf happened to you Elon?

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

#57

Post by visarga »

oliv__ wrote: post #46
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?

You put the two agents in a game situation and watch the score. If they fail to communicate effectively, they won't be able to cooperate.

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

#59

Post by CamperBob2 »

cosinetau wrote: post #6

Does 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?

It's an interesting question. "Intellectual terrorism" may not be that much of a stretch.

Nuclear power, for instance, received the same degree of FUD from uninformed commentators for decades that we're starting to see applied to ML and AI now. As a result, we clung to the precautionary principle and burned fossil fuels instead. The human toll associated with that decision, in terms of premature deaths and disabilities, will eventually run into the millions if it hasn't already.

I hope Elon Musk has thought his anti-AI arguments through farther than the activists and journalists of the 1960s and 1970s did. His voice is a powerful one with far-reaching influence. He could do a lot of good with it, or a lot of harm.

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

#60

Post by backpropaganda »

schoen wrote: post #54
shiftpgdn wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have a bachelor's degree and have no idea what curve fitting is.

You might have seen it called "regression" (also "interpolation" and "extrapolation"), but not everyone has necessarily been exposed to this.

New favorite alternative term for deep learning: "nonlinear interpolation"
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