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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

#91

Post by coldtea »

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 saw comments by lots of genuinely afraid laypeople who were producing platitudes to the effect that scientists don't have common sense, that we're "playing god"... etc. Also scary stuff things like the need to take action against evil scientists before it's too late.

Laypeople? Maybe not on this incident, but on general AI progress, that's echoed by Musk, Kurzweil, Hawkings, et al.

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

#92

Post by coldtea »

adityab wrote: post #15
blowski wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Seems like the same problem as nuclear power, GM foods, and just about every other new but complex technology. People don't understand it, and we always fear what we don't understand.

True, but none of those fields have the same kind of "end of humanity" connotations attached, in the general psyche. Clarifications by well-known researchers don't travel as far and wide as urgency-signaling clickbait...

>True, but none of those fields have the same kind of "end of humanity" connotations attached, in the general psyche.

Well, nuclear bombs have been associated with "Doomsday" / end of civilization ("Doomsday device") etc.

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

#93

Post by coldtea »

blowski wrote: post #13
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…

Seems like the same problem as nuclear power, GM foods, and just about every other new but complex technology. People don't understand it, and we always fear what we don't understand.

>Seems like the same problem as nuclear power, GM foods, and just about every other new but complex technology. People don't understand it, and we always fear what we don't understand.

Well, it's also that people who do understand it, can also be severely worried about scientists not understanding it and playing fast and loose for profit.

Medicine/biology can not even put out a decent non-conflicting dietary advice that holds its position for more than 10 years, but they are allowed to assemble genes they half-understand and put them out in an ecosystem whose interactions and complex interplays they understand 10% and just see what happens...

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

#94

Post by awkwarddaturtle »

bahjoite wrote: post #82
gabrielgoh wrote: post #32

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 headli…

A minor point: theatlantic.com isn't a British tabloid.

It is a propaganda outlet now owned by Steve Jobs' wife.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Atlantic

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emerson_Collective

The move by tech industry people into media/propaganda is rather worrying.

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

#95

Post by red75prime »

lemondrops wrote: post #88
joopxiv wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think it's quite strange that when respected and rational people like Elon Musk and Stephen Hawking warn against dangers of AI, some people still dismiss it as irrational FUD. Did you consider they might have a point?

On the other hand I think it's quite strange that a talented entrepreneur and a physicist, among others, are considered as a source of expertise in a field they have nothing to do with, per se. I don't see any of the top AI/ML researchers voicing these kind of concerns. And while I highly respect Musk and Hawking, and agree that they are rational people, their concerns seem to be driven by "fear of the unknown" more…

> I can hardly imagine anything worse than us.

Universe full of computronium, solving Collatz conjecture?

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

#96

Post by lemondrops »

red75prime wrote: post #95
lemondrops wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

On the other hand I think it's quite strange that a talented entrepreneur and a physicist, among others, are considered as a source of expertise in a field they have nothing to do with, per se. I don't see any of the top AI/ML researchers voicing these kind of concerns. And while I highly respect Musk and Hawking, and agree that they are rational people, their concerns seem to be driven by "fear of the unknown" more…

> I can hardly imagine anything worse than us. Universe full of computronium, solving Collatz conjecture?

Would it implode if the conjecture was disproved?

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

#97

Post by red75prime »

lemondrops wrote: post #96
red75prime wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I can hardly imagine anything worse than us. Universe full of computronium, solving Collatz conjecture?

Would it implode if the conjecture was disproved?

Maybe, but it's worst case scenario. AI can't prove, nor disprove, nor prove improvability of the conjecture, because shortest proof requires 10^200 terabytes.

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

#98

Post by lemondrops »

cwyers wrote: post #8

This is better than most articles I've seen on this subject, but it still falls victim to AI hype. > Although some reports insinuate that the bots had at this point invented a new language in order to elude their human masters, a better explanation is that the neural networks had simply modified human language for the purposes of more efficient interaction. From the Gizmodo article it links to (which is also okay, bu…

> Even the calmer takes on this are anthromorphizing the machines too much and attributing intelligence to the complete lack thereof.

Exactly. I haven't read the details of the implementation of the system mentioned in the article, but the outputs remind me a lot of what was returned by a text generating neural network of this tutorial that I did once:

http://machinelearningmastery.com/text-generation-lstm-recur...

Especially with fewer epochs (Pulling this out of context, one could also say "This AI is inventing its own language, just by reading Alice in Wonderland!", which is of course utter bullshit.

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

#99

Post by oliv__ »

visarga wrote: post #57
oliv__ wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My question (might be dumb, I don't know much about ML) here is: how do you know that the bots are actually understanding each other as opposed to just sending each other utter gibberish and responding like everything is fine? In other words, how do you determine that there is meaning in a conversation spoken in a language you don't understand?

You put the two agents in a game situation and watch the score. If they fail to communicate effectively, they won't be able to cooperate.

What about non-game situations? Are we assuming it works because it worked in the game?

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

#100

Post by bduerst »

Spooky23 wrote: post #89
bduerst wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We saw the same layman rhetoric with GMO crops in the late 90's to early 00's. Slippery-slope nightmare scenarios, accusations of playing god, corporate greed run unchecked, etc. It seems to be a recurrent theme for new technology. Typically, reasonable people don't buy into most of these scare tactics, even if the tactics are being used as clickbait.

Many of these things have played out. We have declining biodiversity of staple crops, dependence on a small number of herbicides, etC.

Monocropping is an agricultural method that predates GMO technology, so please don't attribute it to GMO. Same with only using herbicides that work.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monoculture

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