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Give AI curiosity, and it will watch TV forever (2018)

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Re: Give AI curiosity, and it will watch TV forever (2018)

#31

Post by aantix »

This trait must serve us in some capacity.

You see this with children and iPads. My kids know 3x what I did when I was their same age. It's as if something can finally fill their bandwidth, keep up with their thoughts, and answer those questions in real-time. No wonder they get angry when it's time to put away the iPad - they're engaged at a high level. Much like when I am programming on a sideproject and my focus is interrupted.

The biggest travesty is that we don't get more control over Youtube's algorithm. That we can't ban all Youtube videos with the word "Minecraft" in it, so that we can override their curiosity and say "OK, learn something else today."

Youtube's focus solely on engagement above all else is the biggest tragedy of the modern world. Such a massive opportunity for education - e.g. inserting more academic videos in between entertainment. But we don't get that feature, or any manual overrides for more control.

If any Youtube engineers are reading, please give us (the parents) more control! Youtube, do better.

Re: Give AI curiosity, and it will watch TV forever (2018)

#32

Post by radium3d »

aantix wrote: post #31

This trait must serve us in some capacity. You see this with children and iPads. My kids know 3x what I did when I was their same age. It's as if something can finally fill their bandwidth, keep up with their thoughts, and answer those questions in real-time. No wonder they get angry when it's time to put away the iPad - they're engaged at a high level. Much like when I am programming on a sideproject and my focus is…

I would also like this for myself. Lol

Re: Give AI curiosity, and it will watch TV forever (2018)

#34

Post by dimatura »

gunshai wrote: post #20
thefourthchime wrote: post #3

Link to the actual paper. https://pathak22.github.io/large-scale-curiosity/ I was curious how they define or reward curiosity, it says it right here: Reinforcement learning algorithms rely on carefully engineering environment rewards that are extrinsic to the agent. However, annotating each environment with hand-designed, dense rewards is not scalable, motivating the need for developing reward functions that are intr…

This seems highly suseptible to what a human might consider irrelevant randomness. Given random images just shuffling indefinitely a curious individual will just give up and say, even though I can't predict the next thing it doesn't pertain to the domain of curiosity.

Right, that's why the "noisy TV problem" is a "problem" - it makes the simple model of curiosity used in the research less effective, because it causes agents to get stuck watching TV instead of exploring and advancing in the game, which is what we'd want them to do. (Though this does seem somewhat reminiscent of certain human behaviors...). One possible solution is to equip agents with a more expressive predictive model, capable of discerning "interesting" randomness from "uninteresting" randomness (for some TBD definition of "interesting", of course I'm handwaving here - I'm sure in the 5 past years there's been progress on this front).

Re: Give AI curiosity, and it will watch TV forever (2018)

#35

Post by otabdeveloper4 »

howlin wrote: post #16
syntaxing wrote: post #5

With the definition of curiosity from the article, it’s not that surprising? A dynamic “screen” is always more interesting than the static map. Definition: The definition that OpenAI team used for artificial curiosity was relatively simple: The algorithm would try to predict what its environment would look like one frame into the future. When that next frame happened, the algorithm would be rewarded by how wrong it w…

There's clearly a sweet spot in the amount of entropy/unpredictability that is "interesting". Otherwise observing white noise would be the most interesting thing imaginable. I don't know the details, but probably you would want to seek unpredictability in a higher level representation of the observed state. White noise is highly unpredictable per pixel, but will get a very predictable representation after a layer or…

No, information entropy of white noise is very low.

(Basically, it's the number of degrees of freedom of the underlying probability distribution, and white noise doesn't have many.)

Re: Give AI curiosity, and it will watch TV forever (2018)

#38

Post by Dxtros »

This reminds me of the murder bot book series by Martha Wells. The main character (an advanced ai robot) started really enjoying human media and even used media as a bargaining chip to work with other bots. One striking moment was when the main character was discussing a rogue and violent robot with a transport bot.

“ART said, What does it want?

To kill all the humans, I answered.

I could feel ART metaphorically clutch its function. If there were no humans, there would be no crew to protect and no reason to do research and fill its databases. It said, That is irrational.

I know, I said, if the humans were dead, who would make the media? It was so outrageous, it sounded like something a human would say.” -Martha Wells, Artificial Condition

Although fiction, it’s very thought provoking in evaluating where a truly sentient AI might place its motives. On one hand the research transport bot (ART) is motivated to protect its humans because it would be functionless without them. While the main character (a security unit, who is typically treated badly by humans) sarcastically but partially truthfully places its motives to not kill humans in funding its curiosity of TV.

Would implementing curiosity in a sentient AI act as a safeguard possibly?

Would curiosity arise as a byproduct of sentience without being directly programmed?

Re: Give AI curiosity, and it will watch TV forever (2018)

#40

Post by ok123456 »

aantix wrote: post #31

This trait must serve us in some capacity. You see this with children and iPads. My kids know 3x what I did when I was their same age. It's as if something can finally fill their bandwidth, keep up with their thoughts, and answer those questions in real-time. No wonder they get angry when it's time to put away the iPad - they're engaged at a high level. Much like when I am programming on a sideproject and my focus is…

TikTok has this switch. There's a STEM mode in the user settings that will only show you educational content on your algorithmic stream.
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