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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

#31

Post by schoen »

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…

> or worse - scared and angry vigilantes going after researchers personally.

The Unabomber did target people connected to computer science and IT, including trying to kill people based on his perception of their research vision and agenda. For example, in his letter to his victim David Gelernter, a prominent computer scientist, he complained about "the way techno-nerds like you are changing the world" and cited Gelernter's ideas from Mirror Worlds (a book about technologies that might currently be called VR, AR, and simulation).

http://www.punkcommunity.com/unapack/press/outside/gvmm68e/l...

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

#32

Post by gabrielgoh »

A fascinating aspect of this entire kerfuffle is that the meta story, the one about sensationalism and "bad journalism" is too, a form of media sensationalism that plays to the ears of a more sober and skeptical audience who wants news about "media sensationalism" and "AI hype".

A bit of digging reveals that no serious news outlet really got this wrong (correct me if I'm wrong!), and most of the sensationalist headlines were from British tabloids

https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2017/06/what-...

http://www.mirror.co.uk/tech/robot-intelligence-dangerous-ex...

but even more surprisingly, the articles themselves demonstrated a fairly sober understanding of what is going on. The only mistake they made was spinning a mundane story way out of proportion, something tabloids literally every day, and have done since their conception.

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

#34

Post by joemi »

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…

What are the counter arguments that should be put forward to those worried about AI? I don't know much/anything about AI/ML research at all, so I don't even know where to begin allaying fears.

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

#35

Post by EGreg »

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 wonder how long until AI chats up women online better than 99% of guys.

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

#36

Post by EGreg »

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…

Ummm you know something is serious when the actual scientists and researchers are clamoring for regulation out of fear.

http://io9.gizmodo.com/prominent-scientists-sign-letter-of-w...

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

#37

Post by imh »

This has all of my favorite media failings in one! It's like bingo! We have the game of telephone, with outlets reporting on outlets reporting on outlets, each diverging further from the primary source. We have attention grabbing headlines completely removed from the article content. Complete lack of oversight, where if you asked any expert they'd say "this is totally wrong." Big media names lending their platforms to "contributors" providing fake credibility with none of the accountability. All of that going viral despite it being complete nonsense!

Yay 2017.

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

#38

Post by Mediterraneo10 »

tonmoy wrote: post #30
shadykiller wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

> The points in the link are about a chemical substance and not really an impact of the GMO seeds directly.

The whole point of Roundup-ready varieties is that you can douse the plants in Roundup and they will still grow well. Sure, there may be other GMO varieties that come without problems, but these particular GMO seeds are inherently linked with glyphosates.

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

#39

Post by ahartman00 »

joemi wrote: post #34
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…

What are the counter arguments that should be put forward to those worried about AI? I don't know much/anything about AI/ML research at all, so I don't even know where to begin allaying fears.

Note, I am a novice, so please correct me, but...

TL;DR; it is very limited in what it can do, the accuracy is sometimes/(often?) not near 100%, it is an old field, meaning the progress has not all been in the past decade[1], and there is a lot of hype.

I have noticed that various techniques are only good at very specific tasks. CNNs are good at image recognition, RNNs are good for language/grammar, etc. Of course, it can only recognize images it has been trained on. There are some impressive applications of these specific tasks. For example, with image recognition that can recognize road signs, pedestrians, etc., you could build a rudimentary self driving car. But it would be wrong to think that anything is possible. IIUC, we have been taking some basic building blocks and constructing systems from them. Cool, but it doesn't mean general AI is right around the corner.

Even then, good can mean 80% accuracy. I can't think of the paper right now, but I read one where they improved the handling of negation in different parts of the sentences for sentiment analysis. They improved the state of the art from ~80% to 86%, IIRC. They were excited, and I know that science/research is built on incremental progress. But that's going from 1/5 wrong to 3/20. Take a look at the generated images from image generation pictures. Impressive, but a skilled photoshopper can do much better, based on what i have seen. And some papers are over hyped[2]. I hope I haven't been too hard on anyone's hard work, I'm just trying to ease fears here.

Also, as mentioned in [1], it is a fairly old field, relative to computer standards of course. For example, backpropagation was a huge breakthrough, but that happened in the 80's. There have been recent breakthroughs, notably deep learning. But it would be just wrong to think that everything you are seeing is the result of the past 10 years. (Which is what I thought until a few months ago :S) Like other science research, it would also be wrong to assume it will continue linearly. In fact, there have been multiple AI winters[1].

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_artificial_intellig... 2. https://medium.com/@yoav.goldberg/an-adversarial-review-of-a...

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

#40

Post by ahartman00 »

nxsynonym wrote: post #16
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…

Unfortunately non-sensationalist news doesn't sell. The layperson is guided by fear and is quick to trust any headline that comes across their newsfeed. AI (and not Machine Learning to an extent) have a bad association with far-fetched sci-fi plots and worst case scenarios. Maybe the best solution would be to re-brand AI/ML as something more abstract.

I've been thinking Big Statistics would be a more accurate description, and doesn't sound scary.
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