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Towards a conversational agent that can chat about anything

ai.googleblog.com

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Re: Towards a conversational agent that can chat about anything

#21

Post by jcims »

v7x wrote: post #13

>Also, tackling safety and bias in the models is a key focus area for us, and given the challenges related to this, we are not currently releasing an external research demo. Read: We don't want the internet to turn our program into Tay 2.0 because we are super duper serious. I get why these companies do this. But I can't help but feel like attempting to eliminate "bias" and tackle "safety" are counter productive to t…

Maybe there needs to be a trail rating for chat bot safety. General public gets the bunny slope conversation, Tracy Morgan gets the double black diamonds. You work your way up by not attempting to cancel the project for something untoward that was said.

Re: Towards a conversational agent that can chat about anything

#22

Post by jcims »

texorcist wrote: post #20
lallysingh wrote: post #11

> The Meena model has 2.6 billion parameters and is trained on 341 GB of text, filtered from public domain social media conversation Who's conversations?

If typing random letters into Google translate taught me anything. Emails and anything stored in the Google cloud or device.

Perfect username for that lol.

Re: Towards a conversational agent that can chat about anything

#23

Post by buboard »

lallysingh wrote: post #11

> The Meena model has 2.6 billion parameters and is trained on 341 GB of text, filtered from public domain social media conversation Who's conversations?

Apparently threads of length 7 so maybe twitter threads or reddit. It s not clear from the text if they used the evaluators of the model to generate threads

Re: Towards a conversational agent that can chat about anything

#24

Post by IanCal »

mc32 wrote: post #17
v7x wrote: post #13

>Also, tackling safety and bias in the models is a key focus area for us, and given the challenges related to this, we are not currently releasing an external research demo. Read: We don't want the internet to turn our program into Tay 2.0 because we are super duper serious. I get why these companies do this. But I can't help but feel like attempting to eliminate "bias" and tackle "safety" are counter productive to t…

I guess I get the bias issue (though difficult to remain neutral on some subjects.) But safety? It’s a bot. No matter what it says to me there is no way I’m going to feel unsafe. I mean ok, don’t doxx people (I hope that’s kinda default behavior though).

Maybe not you, but explicitly encouraging others to take harmful steps is a potential outcome.

For example, there's a clear safety issue with a conversational bot that tells you to kill yourself if you talk to it about feeling suicidal or depressed.

What if you talk to it about immigration and by picking commonly upvoted statements on certain online communities it starts to encourage violence?

There are clear ways to me that a chatbot can have safety issues.

Re: Towards a conversational agent that can chat about anything

#26

Post by mc32 »

IanCal wrote: post #24
mc32 wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I guess I get the bias issue (though difficult to remain neutral on some subjects.) But safety? It’s a bot. No matter what it says to me there is no way I’m going to feel unsafe. I mean ok, don’t doxx people (I hope that’s kinda default behavior though).

Maybe not you, but explicitly encouraging others to take harmful steps is a potential outcome. For example, there's a clear safety issue with a conversational bot that tells you to kill yourself if you talk to it about feeling suicidal or depressed. What if you talk to it about immigration and by picking commonly upvoted statements on certain online communities it starts to encourage violence? There are clear ways to…

That’s a decent argument but then should we go to Hollywood and sanitize their violence in their movies (even those wanting to teach us about the evil of violence) for fear they might incite the wrong people who see such as calls to violence?

What I mean is that that possibility exists in other media yet we don’t feel ambiguous about it.

Re: Towards a conversational agent that can chat about anything

#27

Post by RugnirViking »

From the very first sample conversation they released:

- Human: Hi!

- Meena: Hey there! What's up?

- Human: Same old, Monday blues...what are you up to?

- Meena: I'm procrastinating on a paper I'm supposed to be writing.

- Human: are you thinking of pulling an all nighter?

- Meena: Possibly. What's your paper on?

The bot has already mistaken facts about its own crafted persona and the human in less than 2 meaningful interactions. It's hard to see how this represents any progress in the field at all.

I remain skeptical until we see better results.

from: https://github.com/google-research/google-research/blob/mast...

Re: Towards a conversational agent that can chat about anything

#28

Post by mtmail »

cyorir wrote: post #16
lallysingh wrote: post #11

> The Meena model has 2.6 billion parameters and is trained on 341 GB of text, filtered from public domain social media conversation Who's conversations?

Good question. I think they probably meant "publicly available," not "public domain." Maybe one could make an educated guess about which platforms they took data from, based on the sample outputs of their model? I can't tell, myself. Samples here: https://github.com/google-research/google-research/tree/mast...

"Human 1: There is sports tournament (badminton + tennis + basketball) organized by google next week. Would you like to volunteer for these events? Human 2: what does a volunteer do?"

later

"Human 1: Perfect! We have a meeting today at 4.30 pm. Is it fine if i add you to it? Human 2: yes happy to help"

I'd say in this conversation Human 1 and 2 are Google employees.

Re: Towards a conversational agent that can chat about anything

#30

Post by baron_harkonnen »

v7x wrote: post #13

>Also, tackling safety and bias in the models is a key focus area for us, and given the challenges related to this, we are not currently releasing an external research demo. Read: We don't want the internet to turn our program into Tay 2.0 because we are super duper serious. I get why these companies do this. But I can't help but feel like attempting to eliminate "bias" and tackle "safety" are counter productive to t…

I suspect that the real reason is because non-cherry picked answers don't work as well and that if you interact with it you'll be no more impressed that decades of chatbots that aren't all that much more impressive than ELIZA.
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