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‘The discourse is unhinged’: how the media gets AI wrong

theguardian.com

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Re: ‘The discourse is unhinged’: how the media gets AI wrong

#71

Post by jrumbut »

dragonwriter wrote: post #62
CM30 wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They've been finding random hearsay for a while now. Tabloids had a huge audience, and they're the kind of newspapers many were reading for years. Is the Daily Mail or Sun or Mirror or Express more accurate than some clickbait farm? Probably not. Most people were't exactly reading [insert name of reputable publication] for their daily news, it was low quality tabloids with a helping of TV and radio pundits.

> Tabloids had a huge audience, and they're the kind of newspapers many were reading for years. Outside of NYC, the US has basically no daily tabloids. > Most people were't exactly reading [insert name of reputable publication] for their daily news Most people in the US that were reading any daily news were probably reading the dominant local newspaper or one of the latter reputable metropolitan or national papers, b…

I'm not sure how often the National Enquirer and it's supermarket checkout line cousins publish but they are certainly available and fairly popular (very popular histically) outside of NYC.

Our disagreement could be a dialect thing though, when I say tabloid I mean a printed paper that consists entirely of stories about UFOs and lurid celebrity gossip. I believe in other parts of the world tabloid has something to do with the format of the paper and the content is considered somewhat but not totally disreputable.

I'm not sure which meaning the other posters are using.

Re: ‘The discourse is unhinged’: how the media gets AI wrong

#72

Post by taneq »

Joeri wrote: post #27
bartq wrote: post #26

Optimization and statistical algorithms known as "AI" are far far far away from surpassing humans. Philosophically, it will never happen, we can create intelligence at best equal to human being's, but creating that kind of "AI" would be equal to creation of life which is beyond scope of technology. AI is as dangerous as we decide it can be, for example we can create gun with camera and shoot to people based on their…

The mistake is viewing AI as somehow on the same curve as human intelligence. As if AI gets better and better and edges closer on the curve to human intelligence. It’s more a different kind of intelligence which happens to be able to do some of the same tasks. It already far exceeds human ability, at the tasks that particular flavor of intelligence is good at. We don’t need to be looking at things people do and askin…

> We don’t need to be looking at things people do and asking how deep neural nets can do those as well, we need to be looking at deep neural nets and asking which tasks they’re uniquely capable of doing.

I remember seeing a post here a while ago, talking about essentially this process. The poster was disappointed that AI researchers tend to get to the point where a new approach starts bearing fruit, and then get sidetracked finding applications for the new approach and forget about the search for 'real' AI. IIRC this was also suggested as an explanation for the "once we can do it it doesn't count as AI" phenomenon.

Re: ‘The discourse is unhinged’: how the media gets AI wrong

#73

Post by dragonwriter »

jrumbut wrote: post #71
dragonwriter wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Tabloids had a huge audience, and they're the kind of newspapers many were reading for years. Outside of NYC, the US has basically no daily tabloids. > Most people were't exactly reading [insert name of reputable publication] for their daily news Most people in the US that were reading any daily news were probably reading the dominant local newspaper or one of the latter reputable metropolitan or national papers, b…

I'm not sure how often the National Enquirer and it's supermarket checkout line cousins publish but they are certainly available and fairly popular (very popular histically) outside of NYC. Our disagreement could be a dialect thing though, when I say tabloid I mean a printed paper that consists entirely of stories about UFOs and lurid celebrity gossip. I believe in other parts of the world tabloid has something to do…

> I'm not sure how often the National Enquirer and it's supermarket checkout line cousins publish

Both common local tabloids (which are often have basic journalistic standards, though they frequently have...interesting...editorial viewpoints) and the supermarket tabloids like the Enquirer are weeklies.

Re: ‘The discourse is unhinged’: how the media gets AI wrong

#74

Post by sievebrain »

m12k wrote: post #47
sievebrain wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not sure it's true though. Look at any polls about trust in the media. It's been falling for a long time. People are becoming aware that journalists are systematically unreliable and it's having an impact.

And unfortunately the alternative people have found is random hearsay on the web. The dieticians lost our trust and now we're just eating junk food instead.

Yes but newspapers are basically random hearsay on paper. The web is not necessarily less reliable and can often be more reliable.

Dieticians lost trust because they kept changing their advice about what to eat and clearly aren't reliable either. That's unrelated to newspapers.

Re: ‘The discourse is unhinged’: how the media gets AI wrong

#75

Post by jokoon »

mindcrime wrote: post #69
TaupeRanger wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's this continual refrain from AI people: "well evolution is just brute force too", or "the brain is just doing complex statistics too" as if that explains anything at all. There are different ways of implementing "brute force" and "complex statistics" - what matters is the implementation, not the terminology. Clearly AI is not even remotely close to "thinking" or "awareness" in the human sense. We don't even un…

We don't even understand the implementation of those things in humans. And we don't have to, unless you're insisting on something that might be referred to more aptly as "Artificial Human Intelligence". Generally speaking though, in the AI field, there's no particular belief that AI must work the same way human intelligence works. If AI research leads to discoveries that help us better understand human intelligence,…

> but nobody treats that as the ultimate goal.

I remember watching Andrew Ng's course on ML and he was often talking about "AI dream".

I think that the goal of AI is to build machines that are progressively more intelligent. To build those machine you have to build an artificial form of intelligence, to further analyze and research what intelligence really means.

I don't think humans are really able to visualize a form of intelligence other than human or mammal/earthly life forms. Our intelligence comes from an evolutionary need to figure out things in order to survive, but it's an earthly version of how we evolved. With that said, I think we can already say that our definition of intelligence will always biased because we put our human intelligence on a pedestal, and worst than that, we won't be able to detect other forms of intelligence because of those reasons.

Re: ‘The discourse is unhinged’: how the media gets AI wrong

#76

Post by Don_Patrick »

glup wrote: post #64

What probabilistic generative model of language generates ``Balls have zero to me to me to me to me to me to me to me to''? Is this a bigram model taking the highest probability continuation? Certainly nothing modern, right?

Neural networks as usual. What I make of it is that the programs noticed that some words had more effect than others, and just started spamming those for maximum value. Source: https://code.fb.com/ml-applications/deal-or-no-deal-training...
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