Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

An Epidemic of AI Misinformation

thegradient.pub

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

31–40 of 68 posts

Re: An Epidemic of AI Misinformation

#31

Post by JimmyRuska »

8bitsrule wrote: post #22

The buzzword back in the 70s-80s (after AI over-promised in the 1960s) was 'expert systems'. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Expert_system (To the extent that I have kept up with it) modern AI skips the 'knowledge base' part of ES, in favor of pattern-recognition based on 'training'. Today's (Indeterministic, trained, n-net) AI has clearly saved a lot of time/effort in creating 'knowledge bases'. I suspect it appeals m…

You should use both. Download wikidata and use the manually curated interconnected data available. You could argue it was compiled by the largest pool of neural networks ever assembled. Wikipedia data was curated content that was hierarchically and painstakingly interconnected by humans, the most advanced NN we know of :).

There's now discussion about how neural networks can succumb to data poisoning / adversarial attacks, because there are no immutable facts. Adding a mostly immutable fact table can help keep things grounded in reason. Most of these engines support complex inference abilities that can lead to unexpected connections.

ES is not really dead. It feels like many rules engines changed their names to "AI Intelligent Agents"-type wording to describe their product. Rete algorithm is similar rule based calculation, is still used to calculate FICO score, which you could say fits into the problems that may be better served by the latest Neural network models. Allegro graph lets you query using prolog and is often used for governance and compliance tools. RDFox is one of the latest inference engines that made major advancements in turning first order logic in datalog into parallel computation.

I'd imagine if you can build a neural network that can successfully interact with a ES knowledge base you could easily make a neural network as good as the one that won in jeopardy

Re: An Epidemic of AI Misinformation

#32

Post by perl4ever »

When I saw this item, I thought not of misinformation produced about AI, but misinformation produced by AI.

Some of the Google searches I have done recently turn up mostly automatically written articles that plug in numbers and facts but make no sense at all, because there is no real understanding. (Yes, this is probably not "real" AI, but it's the sort of thing people are and will be trying to apply AI to)

It seems to me that there is no way to get to a serene, well-functioning society that utilizes intelligent machines, because in the process of developing software that can digest and write intelligently about topics humans are interested in, we will inevitably come up with less intelligent software first, that produces plausible misinformation far cheaper than humans. And economics will drive out, is already driving out, real research and journalism. Human society would be drowned by automatically generated misinformation by the time a machine is truly intelligent, whether that is in a couple years or a decade or longer.

I'm increasingly thinking that the people who are worried about artificial intelligence ending the world as we know it have slightly missed the mark - superhuman intelligence is a singularity that we are approaching, but we are going to be ripped apart by the tides beforehand and maybe that will prevent the endpoint from ever happening.

Re: An Epidemic of AI Misinformation

#33

Post by [deleted] »

miketery wrote: post #20
eanzenberg wrote: post #17

Interesting that a few big examples of hype driven articles came from OpenAI. This is dangerous and will lead to additional misinformation and public backlash. Scientists should be unbiased and not market driven, but when OpenAI has these releases I shook my head along with a couple others. Hype lasts the next quarter but is replaced with distrust. Science is a long game of incremental discoveries. Breakthroughs usua…

I think this is what happens when you have various stakeholders and some are driven by KPIs such as reach / views. To that end those specific stakeholders (content writers / marketing) will bias towards sensationalism. That's not to excuse the organizational culture which allows for this behavior / outcome. There does need to be course correction.

[deleted]

Re: An Epidemic of AI Misinformation

#34

Post by unishark »

Fishysoup wrote: post #12
buboard wrote: post #4

Ugh. I dislike the author s permanent negativity, but he s right about a lot. I think it’s worth asking why people feel the need to lie about the future of AI? If they are confident about its future (and I don’t know of a fundamental reason why they would not be) then there is no reason to rush half assed results out the door and overcompensate (like gpt2). There is plenty of theoretical questions and answers to deba…

It's the bullshit process by which people get funding. Make something that has some potentially interesting engineering value, hype it up to hell and back, and funding agencies, investors etc. are more likely to back you. Probably this wasn't everyone's first plan all along, but when people who make a marginally better hot-dog / not-hot-dog classifier put so much spin on it, then everyone else has to just to remain v…

I'd say its the job of academic researchers to dream up high-risk ideas to work on, and to hype up incremental advances as potentially proof-of-concept for those ideas (when they're decades away still, with many potentially unsolvable hurdles left). Generally they are careful to give all sides though, since their reputation among their peers is the basis for their career. The media is a very different story. They just need to catch the interest of the mostly-ignorant, then move on to something new the next story.

Re: An Epidemic of AI Misinformation

#35

Post by unishark »

ilaksh wrote: post #23

OpenAI hype is definitely exaggerated. Seems like there might be a connection with Elon Musk somehow because all of his projects seem to get a massive amount of hype also. The radiology thing, is it really the case that there are no startups in that area with useful AI software? Seems like he overstated that. Part of this is a worldview difference. Many people truly believe that AGI is just around the corner, and tha…

I think there are certainly issues with ML in radiology (i.e. lots of publications of low power studies or overfit models validated incorrectly), but I agree with you that Marcus was being unfair. It is principle a straightforward problem to solve with deep learning. The reason biggest reasons "no actual radiologists have been replaced" are probably just political/social. Hinton cannot be blamed for those hurdles.

Re: An Epidemic of AI Misinformation

#36

Post by [deleted] »

perl4ever wrote: post #32

When I saw this item, I thought not of misinformation produced about AI, but misinformation produced by AI. Some of the Google searches I have done recently turn up mostly automatically written articles that plug in numbers and facts but make no sense at all, because there is no real understanding. (Yes, this is probably not "real" AI, but it's the sort of thing people are and will be trying to apply AI to) It seems…

[deleted]

Re: An Epidemic of AI Misinformation

#37

Post by blazespin »

An AI winter will not happen. We are past the point of no return. The vast majority of research is net positive research.

The only risk is misappropriation of investment, but that has already been smoothed over quickly.

I’d get the complaint if AI was not doing anything useful as it wasn’t in ‘74, but it simply is.

For example, plate recognition, drones and facial recognition. These are brutally efficient technologies. To imagine any government under investing in these is a total misunderstanding of the value that AI brings to military, security, and economic dominance.

It’s a race between nations and the only danger is the computers taking over (not in a general AI way, but in a way that everything is run by algorithms no human can understand)

Re: An Epidemic of AI Misinformation

#38

Post by gwern »

buboard wrote: post #4

Ugh. I dislike the author s permanent negativity, but he s right about a lot. I think it’s worth asking why people feel the need to lie about the future of AI? If they are confident about its future (and I don’t know of a fundamental reason why they would not be) then there is no reason to rush half assed results out the door and overcompensate (like gpt2). There is plenty of theoretical questions and answers to deba…

He's also wrong about a lot. For all his insistence on accuracy, he himself is misleading or ignorant. Like his slam of the Dartmouth project - even if you knew nothing about it, all you have to do is click through to see the claims of 'solving vision' are sheer projection and urban legend. And he's happy to make up claims out of whole cloth: for example, when he says "AlphaGo works fine on a 19x19 board, but would need to be retrained to play on a rectangular board; the lack of transfer is telling.", for which he provides precisely zero evidence, he ignores the fact that AG training works fine on a mixture of board sizes and such progressive growing/curriculum training in fact seems to accelerate training (https://arxiv.org/abs/1902.10565) and that rectangular convolutions are a thing that exist, and there would be plenty of transfer if anyone tried. If no one has tried that exact thing, it's because it would be pointless and it's obvious to everyone not named 'Marcus' that it'd work fine, being rectangular doesn't mystically stop it from working anymore than using a 13x13 rather than 19x19 board makes AG-style training stop working. (This is not the first time Marcus has claimed that something didn't work; I first realized that he doesn't actually keep up with the AI literature when I pointed out to him on Twitter that plenty of knowledge graphs were in use combined with DL, and Google Search was the biggest example of this, and he had no idea what I was talking about.)

No matter what DL or DRL does, or how little his own preferred paradigm does, Marcus will never ever admit anything. AlphaGo beats humans? Well, it just copied humans. AlphaZero learns from scratch? Well, he wrote a whole paper explaining how akshully it still copies humans because the tree search encodes the rules. MuZero throws out even the tree search's knowledge of rules? Crickets and essays about 'misinformation'.

Re: An Epidemic of AI Misinformation

#39

Post by mbruce »

blazespin wrote: post #37

An AI winter will not happen. We are past the point of no return. The vast majority of research is net positive research. The only risk is misappropriation of investment, but that has already been smoothed over quickly. I’d get the complaint if AI was not doing anything useful as it wasn’t in ‘74, but it simply is. For example, plate recognition, drones and facial recognition. These are brutally efficient technologie…

This is primarily deep learning which is not general purpose AI

Re: An Epidemic of AI Misinformation

#40

Post by TrinaryWorksToo »

thu2111 wrote: post #16
spicyramen wrote: post #11

Let us remember that AI is at the center of the cloud wars. Google, Amazon and Microsoft while they produce ton of research, their sales teams need to market those R&D investment to get customers interested in their tech. We are at a stage that AI is still a buzz word for many companies, once we evolve and deploy more and more of AI cases, we will see less and less articles promising things that can't be implemented

That's probably a part of it. Note how the Google TPUs aren't for sale. If you want them you have to use the Google Cloud. The cloud is expensive and slow ... I think everyone is shocked when they first see perf numbers coming off Azure. I don't know if GCE is better, but the temptation to overload the hardware is always there: hardware rental is fundamentally a business with low barriers to entry. Anyone can buy som…

Their tpus are for sale: https://coral.ai/products/
Post reply on HN