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Facebook M – The Anti-Turing Test
- argonaut 11y agoWhy is this even a question? According to Facebook itself, it's mostly human-driven. http://recode.net/2015/11/03/facebooks-virtual-assistant-m-is-super-smart-its-also-probably-a-human/ http://recode.net/2015/11/03/facebooks-virtual-assistant-m-i...
- BukhariH 11y ago> "The opinion is split as to whether or not it’s a real AI, and there seems to be no way of proving its nature on way or the other." Clearly, the author didn't even do the most basic fact checking. Since, Facebook clearly told everyone that M was going to be AI that was assisted by humans. It's literally in the announcement post: https://www.facebook.com/Davemarcus/posts/10156070660595195 https://www.facebook.com/Davemarcus/posts/10156070660595195 > "It's powered by artificial intelligence that's trained and supervised by people."
- icebraining 11y agoBut that's exactly the point: is it AI trained by people, or people aided by AI tools? It's not the same.
- ikeboy 11y agoSee http://www.wired.com/2015/08/how-facebook-m-works/ http://www.wired.com/2015/08/how-facebook-m-works/
- acqq 11y agoYes, the article is explicit: "For more complicated tasks, such as making a driving test appointment at the DMV, the humans will do most of the heavy lifting. They’ll actually place a call to the DMV."
- azernik 11y agoI think there's a large space where the two are indeed the same.
- tonylucas 11y agoI think that also depends on who is actually completing/fulfilling the task, in the DMV example its AI adding context to a task that can't be automated easily. The AI can still do the requirements/information gathering and leaving the job for a person to do. For common issues (support triage, customer service issues) even this still has significant value. Equally from a training point of view, it may simply be the person correcting/confirming the AI is right, and leaving it to get on with the process, rather than fallover to the human completely.
- bad_user 11y agoYou know how to read, great for you. But that doesn't say much, as all AI that was ever attempted was trained and supervised by people. Plus this was blackbox testing and I found it to be an interested read nonetheless.
- br3w5 11y agoI think it's an interesting exercise in how to prove the level of human involvement in this AI.
- betandr 11y agoI suppose the interesting point is more that it's being marketed as not really operated by humans as a positive when in many instance in our modern world the reverse is true. And also it's an interesting application of the Turing Test too. :)
- Lewton 11y agoTihs is uslulay how I tset wehther i'm tlaknig to an ai or not
- tux3 11y agoThis is always impressive to me, I didn't realize a thing until "tlaknig"! Although I suppose you could specifically train an AI to recogize this.
- maxerickson 11y agoTaking the best match from a spell checker on unrecognized words will handle most of it. A threshold would probably work better against a mix of jumbled words and real gibberish.
- pbhjpbhj 11y agoWonder if you can choose a sentence such that humans see it one way (homophones, jumbles), perhaps via context clues, but the closest match (edit distance?) for the individual words gives a different sentence? Certainly seems doable. Along those lines would be something like: "if I have a coin and I, err,trun tit, which face is showing?" but it's not a good example. Here "err, trun tit" gets corrected to return but the end should find to "err, turn it" instead making the face showing be "the opposite". Hopefully you get the idea, bet there are some really good phrases that would fit this scheme.
- maxerickson 11y agoIt's at least an interesting puzzle. A better way to say what I was getting at is that fairly straightforward language statistics go a long way towards unjumbling letters. A spell checker could also include quite a few human perceptual quirks as scoring rules without crossing the line into what I would think of as training an AI.
- Gankro 11y agoTo be clear, this is applying the classic observation that if you keep the first and last letter correct, humans are really good at unjumbling the center.
- TerryADavis 11y agoGod says... Tuesday's waster wiled beforehand gnomes electrocutions bucketing clogged underside's masseuse's spurn Gascony Purina Amenhotep dowels mischance swop's ambitious garrotting Erna's isms dunce coauthor's gemstone topcoat meadow's parented frill shan't outfits expressways broils dispatch's cablegrams Argonne's schwas underworld's andante's allocation's Jay blackest housebreaking's Wales Annmarie transfixes flotsam's telegraph spartan exhibitionism store soirées Bible's Manama cerulean's rashes niggers cookeries governorship's entitled Celsius deadest blockhead transducer lurked forefather's sticker anatomists kinsman's calyx gunpowder tented garland hypodermic's syllabifies rampages diagnosis's Arabic's charbroiled June's carcinomas collated kiosk's rioted zircon's bloodstain shipload's intaglios hinds scupper thighs Bhutto Madeira's datelined schemers descriptive Enid arable littering yoghourts almond's
- fab1an 11y agoFacebook's strategy here is to build an AI brand before they have the actual technology, which could make a lot of sense. At the same time the interactions between M's team and its users will provide meaningful data to train the AI on.
- andreasvc 11y agoI've never heard vaporware characterized as something that "could make a lot of sense"; how could it? Plus I'm doubtful whether the data would be very meaningful. A bunch of people adversarially trying to figure out whether the AI is real is not representative or generally useful data.
- bgilroy26 11y agoThey're expecting people to use it like Siri or Cortina or 'OK Google'
- drumdance 11y agoMicrosoft Windows was vaporware for years. They famously did a "demo" that was just a manipulation of graphics. But Bill Gates correctly grasped that the future of the business rested on it and set about building the brand.
- andreasvc 11y agoHow does your N=1 anecdote show that vaporware makes a lot of sense? I'd say they got away with it, but not that it was a crucial factor in their success.
- drumdance 11y agoBecause that N became the dominant computing company for a generation? Apple was way ahead of Microsoft with windowing technology. Gates even offered to help Apple port it to the x86 architecture. He was content with being the dominant application developer, not the OS. Jobs blew him off so he seized the opportunity. Around the same time IBM was working on OS/2, which was a much better technology than Windows. Microsoft worked with IBM on OS/2, but then gaslighted them by "debuting" Windows 1.0 Edit: And don't forget how me VC pitches are about "what we're going to build" vs. "what we've already built." Vaporware is not an optimal strategy, but in many cases it works.
- lhnz 11y agoI wonder how many years it will be before a real AI can compete with Facebook's AI? I guess by the time that's possible Facebook's pretend AI will already have cornered the market. The public will only be able to see that you were the late entrant and that while your AI is faster it's occasionally incorrect in peculiar ways... This seems like a fairly solid plan by Facebook to crown themselves the winners of a race that hasn't yet finished.
- AJ007 11y agoPretending you have a working technology when you don't has been a recent theme in the startup world.
- icebraining 11y agoVaporware is neither new nor restricted to the startup world. There's actually a whole (sub)genre of music based on the concept!
- drdeca 11y agoVaporwave?
- drivers99 11y agoThomas Edison claimed to have a long lasting light bulb before he actually did. He showed it to reporters one at a time in a booth. Between observers, he would change out the light for a fresh one. Source "How We Got to Now: Light" (on Netflix currently, at least in the US). Found the clip on PBS. Skip to 2:20 for the specific part: http://www.pbs.org/how-we-got-to-now/big-ideas/light/ http://www.pbs.org/how-we-got-to-now/big-ideas/light/
- pluma 11y agoI thought Edison had mostly been dismissed as not even remotely as great an inventor as most people thought he was?
- pjc50 11y agoThis is a new angle on the app-outsourcing-to-low-paid-contractors "technology": it's so dehumanising that you have to pretend to be a computer while you work! It's also strikingly similar to the original "mechanical turk".
- provemewrong 11y ago>It's also strikingly similar to the original "mechanical turk". That's what the M stands for.
- personjerry 11y agoNo, it's not. Unless you have a citation...?
- provemewrong 11y agoIt's a joke.
- avalaunch 11y agoI still want a citation.
- monochromatic 11y agoCite: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10538766 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10538766
- graeham 11y ago"I'm AI but humans help train me" The implication to me is that the chat is with a human, who is using an AI tool with the intention of training that tool. What better way to train a new service than to launch it, then answer all the weird, unexpected questions with humans? Gradually more of the questions get answered, the AI gets better trained, and the human-AI becomes increasing more AI. Further, as the AI gets better, the human working with it has to do less, so they can roll out the service to more users without requiring more staff. Perhaps eventually, no human is needed.
- abritishguy 11y agoThe AI can assist the human as well. It may not be confident that its response is accurate and the human just clicks send.
- PaulHoule 11y agoGreat point -- if a system has a good probability estimator it can send questionable answers for review to raise accuracy up to the commercially useful level.
- jhpriestley 11y agoAIs are already trained on huge corpuses of natural human communication, but they still aren't able to reliably analyze human language. Adding a few more gigabytes of chat logs isn't going to do much.
- hodwik 11y agoThey weren't trained to read natural language, and then respond with some programmatic action filtered into natural language: Bot reads "What's the temperature like near me?" Person calls "$get user-local-temperature" API responds "{temperature:{f:77},{c:99}}" Human writes "It's 77 degrees outside!" Training set now contains that relationship between that question, that API call, that response, and that natural language response (and probably the users location, age, gender, and so on, all captured in the meta-data about the response in the corpus). Bot reads "What's it like outside?" Person calls "$get user-local-weather" API responds "{weather:{now:Sunny},{today:Cold}}" Human writes "It's sunny now, but will be cold later today." And so on. I think the goal here is training on standard API calls as the response, and taking their data return and converting it into grammatical sentences. It's a two step training process. Know which API to call, and know how to convert API response to natural language. There's no serious corpus yet for that -- if this is real, it is important work.
- Grue3 11y ago"Can you solve this CAPTCHA for me?" (provided the CAPTCHA is sufficiently OCR-resistant)
- andreasvc 11y agoIf you want to avoid giving information about whether you are an AI or human, you simply respond "No." Besides, the CAPTCHA's that are sufficiently hard to solve for computers are already hard for humans as well.
- thanatropism 11y agoQuestion isn't "will you?" -- it's "can you?"
- xj9 11y ago"Yes, but I don't want to."
- kuschku 11y ago> Can you tag for me all photos in my album that contain a kitten, but not a dog, with "kitten", and those that contain a kitten and a dog, with "pets<3"? That should keep it busy.
- twright0 11y agoThis approach is backwards. This is the kind of problem that is easy for a person, but not for an AI. So if M was an AI pretending to be a human, you could use this to determine that. But in this case, the suspicion is that M is a human pretending to be an AI - and they could simply decline to attempt the task, or pretend to be unable (or do a bad job deliberately), and you'd learn nothing from negative results.
- sidcool 11y agoHumans working at facebook scale! Would be interesting to see how many people are employed to do this...Are they Googling?
- MasterScrat 11y agoThe reference to Google Maps was a surprise to me... Does't FB typically relies on Bing maps?
- sidcool 11y agoIndeed, they do. Facebook has traditionally been inclined towards Microsoft than Google. Probably because they are the lesser rivals in business.
- pinkrooftop 11y agoMicrosoft was an early investor in Facebook
- adrianN 11y agoThis reminds me of the Focused people in Vernor Vinge's "A Deepness in the Sky", slaves that were integrated into the computer system to provide function that surpassed the computer's built in intelligence.
- austinjp 11y agoI've not read that. Personally i felt we're one step closer to the "cookies" in Charlie Brooker's "White Christmas" episode of Black Mirror. From the article : “Our test participant was impressed with how much M could do, but was sometimes disappointed at how long it took,” UserTesting’s report reads. “He concluded that it would be very useful if he could set it to perform a non-urgent tasks for him while he worked on other things.” That made me shudder. One person tutting at the poor performance of "it". It seems plausible that robot-powered tasks would complete rapidly, and humans power the slower processes. So the participant didn't know it was human-powered. If anything, that makes things worse.
- mrdrozdov 11y agoI don't get the part about the reverse number lookup. Couldn't they be using a disposable phone number that is allocated to Facebook? That's what Handy, Airbnb, Uber, etc. do. Why would they have to block their caller id? And how does either method prove or disprove that M is human?
- shawabawa3 11y agoThat doesn't prove that M's human, what prove's it's human is that a Human voice called. The fact it says Facebook is just evidence that it was indeed from M, and not just him getting his friend to call him and pretend.
- Sujan 11y agohttps://youtu.be/6QRvTv_tpw0?t=28 https://youtu.be/6QRvTv_tpw0?t=28 ;)
- throwaway7767 11y ago> The fact it says Facebook is just evidence that it was indeed from M, and not just him getting his friend to call him and pretend. It doesn't really prove anything, since caller ID is extremely easy to spoof (I used to call my mates from the emergency number for kicks when I was younger). Not that I have any doubt as to the credibility of the story.
- deleted 11y ago[deleted]
- hellbanner 11y agoSo how well does this scale, if all of Facebook's users are using "M" like this?
- adrianb 11y agoLaunch is limited to selected users in Silicon Valley.
- hellbanner 11y agoThat explains why Facebook.M has such knowledge of the local area.
- ben_utzer 11y agoIs it me or all the photos are blurred? I can't read them
- Sir_Cmpwn 11y agoJust you, I'm afraid.
- berdario 11y agoIt's not just you. It's basically unreadable on Firefox on Android (and what's worse... the page prevent arbitrary zooming, unless you "request the Desktop page"). It's depressing how a supposedly well-designed platform like Medium still falls short of providing an usable mobile interface.
- 7Z7 11y agoCan confirm, it's perfectly readable on Safari on iPhone. Also zoomable.
- yyhhsj0521 11y agoMy photos were blurred and I found in F12 developer tool that they failed to load. After a little fiddling with my network they successfully loaded and became clear.
- codeshaman 11y agoRegardless of wether M is currently more human than AI, we could project that in the not-so-distant future (after it's trained), M will be mostly, 99% AI. The technology itself will become more and more available and other companies will also use similar AI tech to work with customers. The ultimate moment will be when the AIs start talking to each other in human language, each 'thinking' that the other is a human. That will be the moment when the machines have decided something for you and while at first you'll think that you triggered that, at some point it will become unclear - is the human triggering the AI or is the AI triggering the human. Pretty soon, everything we consume and everywhere we go will be controlled (and, a bit later, predestined and programmed for us) by the AI.
- rvac 11y agoIt's a human using Siri to answer your questions.
- VLM 11y agoBased on punctuation analysis, word choice, tone, its not just any human but a mid 20s white female. Probably front ending google. Real comedy would be going to mturk to try and find the task to communicate try to crack it recursively "M find me the mechanical turk task for this request".
- SIOP 11y agoThanks for this. Fascinating. A really interesting article.
- wallzz 11y agoDoes anyone know how can I try it ? I can't find a link or something like that.
- richard_mcp 11y agoLooks like a limited roll-out to users in the Bay Area.
- Maksadbek 11y agoIs M currently for USA, it did not appear in my contact yet.
- niix 11y agoReminds me of the chat bots I used to write for AOL and AIM "progz".
- jwalton 11y agoBad typing is definitely not enough to measure if an AI is really a human. As a teenager, I wrote a chatbot for an online text based game. I have it knowledge of a QWERTY keyboard layout, and when "typing" it had a small random chance of pressing the key next to the key it wanted to press. It would also sometimes transpose characters. Sloppy typing can be simulated. Might be an interesting test to do a statistical analysis of your subject's mistakes against a corpus of real human mistakes, since there are many common mistakes humans make, and a random AI might make inhuman mistakes, but this would of course not be conclusive.
- espadrine 11y agoSimulating bad typing is only necessary to fake a human. Here, having bad typing when faking an AI is stranger. That said, AIs trained through the chat transcripts of a large number of conversations may produce mistakes. I remember reading a paper that gave good results that way, with the side-effect that it produces typing mistakes as a result. I cannot find that paper again, unfortunately. Edit: found it! http://arxiv.org/pdf/1506.05869v1.pdf http://arxiv.org/pdf/1506.05869v1.pdf
- _lce0 11y agoI wonder if there's code available, from that paper. Results look promising. Thanks for sharing!
- jwalton 11y agoI just realized I typed "have" instead of "gave". Now everyone knows I'm a robot. -_-
- egmalek 11y agoImagine if the 1.3B Facebook users were eligible to be called upon by the AI on a Quora way to answer a question the AI couldn't answer alone...
- nickodell 11y agoI think the quality of the answers would be along the lines of Yahoo Answers.
- kriro 11y agoSo basically the suspicion is that M is a concierge MVP? From reading the chat excerpt I'd agree. Edit: It would be interesting to devise a way in which you can make two Ms talk to each other (or have M talk to Siri etc.). Maybe "can you pretend to be a customer for my XYZ business"
- pinkrooftop 11y agoHuman or AI the level of service provided seems pretty amazing
- username223 11y agoCan M wade through phone support menus and cancel Comcast subscriptions? I look forward to a darkly-humorous future in which we pit poorly-paid third-world citizens against each other in wars of call center attrition. Better, once we equip them with those sound-board UIs that play pre-recorded answers in native English-speaking voices (can't find the link), English can become a transmission protocol that few people deal with directly.
- envy2 11y agoM can indeed cancel Comcast accounts. Use this knowledge wisely...
- Hortinstein 11y ago> I look forward to a darkly-humorous future in which we pit poorly-paid third-world citizens against each other in wars of call center attrition. This sounds like a 10 page side story in a Neil Stephenson Book. I love it.
- JadeNB 11y agoIt's very nearly part of the strategy of one of the players in Stross's Accelerando (http://www.amazon.com/Accelerando-Singularity-Charles-Stross/dp/0441014151 http://www.amazon.com/Accelerando-Singularity-Charles-Stross...).
- templaedhel 11y agoFor what it's worth this book (which is excellent) is also published as a free ebook under a Creative Commons license (http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/fiction/accelerando/accelerando-intro.html http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/fiction/accelera...). The author is also a relatively prolific HN poster (https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=cstross https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=cstross).
- nathancahill 11y agoSuch a great book.
- gjm11 11y agoFor something with a similar flavour, see http://dangermouse.brynmawr.edu/csem/coffeehouse.html; http://dangermouse.brynmawr.edu/csem/coffeehouse.html; start reading where it says "Post Scriptum".
- traverseda 11y agoDidn't like that semicolon.
- gjm11 11y agoUgh. Here's the URL without punctuation after it: http://dangermouse.brynmawr.edu/csem/coffeehouse.html http://dangermouse.brynmawr.edu/csem/coffeehouse.html
- jasperry 11y agoI wonder if you can ask M to use fewer exclamation points. From the conversations I saw in the article, it's a little too chirpy (or should I say "clippy") for my taste.
- eric_h 11y agoI had the same sentiment. Similarly - when I ask Siri what time it is on my new Apple TV, after midnight it always says Zzzz... as if it's judging me for staying up late. I'm not a huge fan of AIs fake emoting all the time. Occasionally, it's amusing, but all the time it just rubs me the wrong way.
- agopaul 11y agoHas anyone tried to hack a script that put in communication two M chat sessions?
- joss82 11y agoBut Facebook publicly admitted that the service is powered by real humans: http://www.wired.com/2015/08/facebook-launches-m-new-kind-virtual-assistant/ http://www.wired.com/2015/08/facebook-launches-m-new-kind-vi...
- free2rhyme214 11y agoThis guy is hilarious. If you're reading HN comments you know that AI isn't quite there yet right? We're easily 5-10 years away from anything you're looking for.
- chrisBob 11y agoI just had the perfect idea for a test, but then I went back to the recent discussion on Mimic[0] and double checked my favorite example[1]. Google has already updated their support, but there is a chance that Facebook M is still behind. Test them now before it is too late: "When is the next Τаylοr Ѕwіft concert in my area?" [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10437619 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10437619 [1] https://www.google.com/search?q=Τаylοr+Ѕwіft https://www.google.com/search?q=Τаylοr+Ѕwіft
- swang 11y agoDid the author ask it about how we can avert the heat death of the universe?
- evv 11y agoThere is insufficient data for a meaningful answer.
- moey 11y agoDo you guys think one person, working alone, can develop an turing passing AI?
- SilasX 11y ago>The most noteworthy aspect of this reply is that “Google Maps” wasn’t capitalized, suggesting that maybe, just maybe, a human typed it out in a hurry. Or they're smart enough to add random mistakes. When I started a project for setting up multiple ways to say the same form letter, I thought of adding a random-typo feature to make it look like humans were writing it. I'm sure these guys are at least as cheeky as me...
- Quanttek 11y agoBut they don't try to convince you M is a human. Indeed the opposite. So it would be rather stupid to add typos to an AI, when you want people to see it as an AI
- mizzao 11y agoI don't think there has to be a huge controversy here. It's perfectly plausible to build a system that contains a hybrid of human and machine intelligence, where the humans work on the more fuzzy questions that cannot be directly answered yet, and the interactions used to fill in the gap as the AI is improved for later.
- nhf 11y agoYep! There's a lot of research going on in that area. For example, http://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=2702416 http://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=2702416 Some recent work on fusing machine learning with Mechanical Turk workers to create "sensors".
- aeturnum 11y agoWhat a silly conclusion. The fact that a human called his land line does not mean M (the thing in messenger) isn't an AI. At best, it proves that M has humans who work for M making phone calls. I don't have any insight or opinion about the question of how human M is, but this article seems makes a bunch of assumptions that make the whole investigation somewhat silly.
- azernik 11y agoI think the distinction is a philosophical question. Are they humans who run errands for the AI, or is the AI a tool the humans use? Perhaps better to think of them as coworkers, each specializing in their strengths. The question is, just how much of the workload is the machine capable of handling? Because I think that's the big indicator of scalability.
- downandout 11y agoClearly there are some humans behind M that are doing things that Facebook would rather entrust to humans (like making phone calls). However, the phone call only proves that this specific aspect of M is human. In the end, though, I suppose it doesn't matter. I'm going to guess that the ultimate end-game on M is for Facebook to collect advertising/affiliate revenue from recommending things. For example, if someone asks for a Chinese restaurant, plumber, dentist, lawyer, etc. in their city, the one they suggest could be the one that paid Facebook for it. As long as these types of fees make it profitable for Facebook, it doesn't matter if the service needs to be powered by millions of humans. In fact, that would be great - it would mean millions of new jobs. Larry Page famously told an early investor that Google wasn't yet sure how it would make money, but that search was the only situation in which people would tell a computer what they wanted, and that there had to be a way to make money from that. M is exactly the same - a way to get people to tell Facebook what they want, and it puts them in a great position to monetize it.
- kayoone 11y agoBasically what GoButler or Magic are already doing, just AI based. But this is the goal for all similar services, otherwise it will not scale.
- Houshalter 11y agoMost likely it's mostly AI, that redirects to a human when it's confused. Most of those responses look pre-programmed.
- yoavm 11y agothis might be one of the worst jobs ever
- dyeje 11y agoIt ends so many sentences with exclamations!
- mahdiponline 11y agoAs much as I appreciate the effort, I don't think proving M has humans behind it is any of help. We write AIs. We try to make them act just like us. We teat them in everyway we can imagine and we expect them to act like a human would in response. Providing an algorithm for this is not always useful or maybw not even possible. My theory on this is that Facebook is powering M with both people and some sort of AI software that not only analyzes and sometimes finds the best response, but it also analyzes the conversations people on both sides made. Now this can be useful on several levels. Facebook can improve it's AI algorithm in less time, the AI can help people on their job in the meantime (by analyzing their work and commenting on it)