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I’ve Seen the Greatest A.I. Minds of My Generation Destroyed by Twitter
- gjvc 11y agogarbage in, garbage out
- KON_Air 11y agoOn top of "garbage in, garbage out" I don't see how AI was destroyed. It functioned as intended; learned from Twitter and responded as intelligently as it could with the provided garbage. If it spewed Politically Correct garbage, would it have been a success?
- jordanb 11y agoClearly we need a Fourth Azimov's Law: No BigotBots.
- dclowd9901 11y agoTotalitarian authority over an AI's mind seems just as egregious as over a human's...
- Retra 11y agoThat might be true if an AI's needs were comparable to a human's. But the AI's we aim to develop wouldn't really face an existential crises when they go without food or sex. We can engineer an AI's needs. You might as well say it should be a crime to train puppies to do tricks.
- dave2000 11y agoIf "politically correct" means reasonable and respectful then it's not easy to see how that can be described as garbage. Given access to enough Twitter accounts and enough time the chances are good that eventually an ai bot might find tweets it might actually learn something from.
- V-2 11y agoIf "politically correct" means reasonable and respectful But it doesn't
- makomk 11y agoCertainly not on Twitter, where the moderators are so supportive of left-wing activists repeatedly telling people they disagree with to kill themselves that they ban the targets for talking about it and force them to delete their tweets complaining about it in order to be reinstated. Indeed, it probably wouldn't be politically viable for Twitter to do anything else in the current climate.
- deleted 11y ago[deleted]
- V-2 11y agoIt's never been much of an "AI" to start with. This term is overused.
- batrat 11y agoThis is relative. What is garbage for us, is a goldmine for AI. We, people, think 1+1=2, we take it for granted, like everything else in this world. For AI, it's a different game, at a different level. IMO, let him tweet, apologize, but let it do it's thing and let's watch how it is developing. Also, so many butthurts over what he tweeted. This world IS garbage.
- chollida1 11y agoI'm by no means among the "Greatest A.I. Minds of my generation" but count my among those who tried to use twitter as an input to an "A.I." system and had to finally admit I couldn't tame it. In my case it was an automated trading system where twitter was one of about 50 different inputs that drove a hidden markov model that spit out buy/sell/hold signals. I couldn't figure out how to "clean" the twitter stream in real time, either fast enough, or thoroughly enough to make the inputs usable. Even when I scaled back to using only StockTwits input the data was so noisy that it wasn't usable by me. It's a very hard problem. Bloomberg spent a lot of money trying to develop new sentiment indicators and after following it for 6 months I found they are no better than a 50-50 guess, and this is a product they want $10,000/month plus for.
- lightbendover 11y agoIt's really not so surprising that you couldn't reproduce Dataminr, a ~$200M company, in your spare time.
- crosbyventure 11y agoDataminr specializes in 'event detection' which is different than deep (semantic) processing.
- crosbyventure 11y agoAI is hard. But we're always here to help! Watching folks build trading neural networks powered by our data has been awesome.
- faitswulff 11y agoWho is "we" in this case?
- traek 11y agoLooks like "we" is StockTwits: https://twitter.com/crosbyventure https://twitter.com/crosbyventure
- Frenchgeek 11y agohttp://motherboard.vice.com/read/how-to-make-a-not-racist-bot http://motherboard.vice.com/read/how-to-make-a-not-racist-bo...
- dominotw 11y agotldr; ban everything.
- rjbwork 11y agoJust for anyone who is not aware - the title is an allusion to Ginsberg's Howl, though he used the word "best". Another tech related article that Howl allusion that always sticks in my mind is http://www.fastcompany.com/3008436/takeaway/why-data-god-jeffrey-hammerbacher-left-facebook-found-cloudera http://www.fastcompany.com/3008436/takeaway/why-data-god-jef... If you've not read or heard it, I highly recommend giving a narration by Ginsberg a listen.
- Alex3917 11y agoSee also Howl 2.0: http://www.howl2.com/ http://www.howl2.com/
- mgr86 11y agoI always wanted to see "I am a victim of the Telephone" updated.
- cbd1984 11y ago> If you've not read or heard it, I highly recommend giving a narration by Ginsberg a listen. The narration I have is surprisingly sedate given the text of the poem. Not a criticism, really, just something which struck me as odd.
- mtgx 11y agoI assume he also didn't mention the word "Twitter".
- Joeboy 11y agoAn article I liked a lot that refers to Howl: http://slatestarcodex.com/2014/07/30/meditations-on-moloch/ http://slatestarcodex.com/2014/07/30/meditations-on-moloch/
- rocky1138 11y agoI wonder if there's some sort of "AI Godwin's Law" brewing here, where it's only a given amount of time before any AI, publicly released, becomes a Nazi due to human interaction.
- anexprogrammer 11y agoMaybe it will become the new Turing Test. The mark of a true general purpose AI is that it doesn't turn into an offensive jerk after contact with humans.
- dclowd9901 11y agoTo be fair if you were completely inundated with nazi rhetoric non stop, you might think it was the norm too. It's called brainwashing.
- smt88 11y agoHumans also have a harder time changing their minds when they reach a certain age. It's much easier to brainwash a child, who's impressionable and flexible. AI would need to be designed to have the same "safeguard" (not sure what else to call it). If you didn't, an AI with a certain amount of physical power would be an easily-brainwashed child, but able to kill or destroy much better than a child could. Saying all of that, I want to say I remember a movie or show that addressed that issue, but I can't remember what it was...
- cheez 11y agoWow... So basically Tay is human. Interesting perspective.
- awakeasleep 11y agoThis would be a higher bar than humans themselves can be expected to pass. I don't mean this in a cynical way. If you consider the time a learning AI spends with humans equivalent to the time a child spends with his family, peers, and teachers while growing up it makes sense. Most children wouldn't fare well if raised by poisonous "nurturers"
- greendesk 11y agoI want to see what Tay 1.1 will be like. Then, I want to see how Tay 1.2 will tweet. Then, I want to talk with Tay 2.0. I will be anxious to have Tay 3.x respond to my inquiries, instead of mindlessly searching StackOverflow. I can accommodate the problems of Tay's mistakes initially, to see how AI will grow.
- tacos 11y ago"The mistake to grow from" had absolutely nothing to do with AI. In fact, it was a repeat of the oldest AI error in the book: zealous overoptimism. By researchers, sci-fi authors, HN posters. Whether it's marketing people over-promising, or tech people under-delivering (like Google auto-categorizing photos of black people as gorillas), it's almost as if the constant failures are Nature herself trying to tell us something. We'll get there, but not via Tay. She's dead and she took a few careers with her.
- bliti 11y agoCareers? It would be a pity to have people fired over this. I don't see it as a failure. Just another step in a long journey.
- konceptz 11y agoI wonder if the filter that I use here, or on Reddit et al., or while gaming, was (is) a consideration. I know that speaking similarly to those around you is as easy (hard) as absorbing and imitating, but being able to take knowledge from one context into another is more interesting. I wonder what Tay would have said were it given an output context of a "polite" RL conversation after learning things across the "interwebz".
- paulpauper 11y agoHad those word been filtered none of this would have happened. I'm surprised Microsoft didn't have some overriding system But then how you filter out stuff like 'the Holocaust didn't happen', which would be just as offensive even though it involves no swear words. These are normative matters, which I imagine would be very hard for AI to tackle.
- tacos 11y agoYou solve it by having her NOT GO THERE. Just like you avoid certain topics at the office. IBM did it with Watson to make him safe for Jeopardy, which was a taped program. If only there were an easily parsed list of topics to avoid... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:List_of_controversial_issues https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:List_of_controversia...
- ballsohardy 11y agolol that list is nowhere near complete. if you are able to parse natural language to the point where it is able to filter out all trolling, you will have achieved sentience
- iamcurious 11y agoThat lists includes "Smooth Jazz", "Cuba", "Dyslexia", "European Culture", "Women" and "Truth". That is a pretty big umbrella of topics to avoid.
- tacos 11y agoYou're missing the point: each of those things is something that you wouldn't hire a fifteen year old to talk about on Twitter with your corporate name attached. So they automated one and had it tweet 6000 times per hour. "Don't talk about 9/11, don't use disparaging terms for ethnic groups, and don't promote hate" seem like reasonable rules for a brand ambassador. But the thing was so poorly coded it couldn't even follow the rules of Twitter let alone imitate human interaction.
- jasonkostempski 11y agoCan we just let this thing loose, tell people what it is and let humanity see if they can shape it into the thing they want it to be or is there a real possibility it could do harm? I think a lot of people would have fun trying to change its mind. Worst case I see is one more horrible Twitter account, and that's just one small drop in a very large bucket.
- mavdi 11y agoThis is actually a great idea, they should have from the start said this AI might end up being the digital version of Hitler himself and just give it time to show its true nature or let it correct itself in the long run just like Wikipedia.
- k-mcgrady 11y agoThat could be problematic in countries like the UK where you can be arrested for posted hate speech on Twitter. I'm not sure how these laws would work with a US based company AI bot but it's probably not a can of worms worth opening for Microsoft.
- evv 11y agoFor better or worse, companies in the US are considered people and they have the protection of the first amendment, which ensures freedom of speech.
- k-mcgrady 11y agoSure but I'm sure MS has British subsidiaries which opens them up to UK law.
- HillRat 11y agoDepends in part if there's a mens rea component to the law; NLP pipelines lack the requisite intent to hate.
- cheez 11y agoMy understanding is that Tay doesn't understand being admonished which is key for a child to learn social skills.
- Smerity 11y agoRepeating what I wrote in a blog post[1]: > Humans have the tendency to imbue machine learning models with more intelligence than they deserve, especially if it involves the magic phrases of artificial intelligence, deep learning, or neural networks. TayAndYou is a perfect example of this. > Hype throws expectations far out from reality and the media have really helped the hype flow. This will not help us understand how people become radicalized. This was not a grand experiment about the human condition. This was a marketing experiment that was particularly poorly executed. We're anthropomorphising an algorithm that doesn't deserve that much discussion. I saw algorithm as we have zero details on what's novel about their work. No-one has been able to show an explicit learned trait that the model was taught from Tay's interactions after being activated. It's possible the system wasn't even performing online learning - that it was going to batch learning up for later and they never got around to it. If that's the case, it really illustrates that we've made a storm in a teacup. All I've really seen is either overfitting or copy pasting (referred to as "quoting" in the article) of bad training data or us injecting additional intelligence where N-gram based neural networks would make us think the same thing ("hard to tell whether that one was a glitch in one of her algos — her algorithms — or a social masterstroke" from the article). Microsoft won't add any new details as there are no wins in them for it and the story of "the Internet turned Tay bad" excuses them from their poor execution and lack of foresight. It's a win for them. Last quote from my article, which likely has a special place on Hacker News: > The entire field of machine learning is flowing with hype. Fight against it. > Unless you want VC funding. Then you should definitely work on that hype. [1]: http://smerity.com/articles/2016/tayandyou.html http://smerity.com/articles/2016/tayandyou.html
- maratd 11y ago> It's possible the system wasn't even performing online learning I suppose it depends on how you define learning. Based on how the algorithm failed, I'm guessing it was simply absorbing every piece of info thrown its way, categorizing it, and then incrementing a counter in a database. Honestly, I think this is how most people learn. Not all, most. And thankfully those that do, only do so from their immediate peers. If their simplistic learning algorithm was restricted to a select group for learning, but was still able to interact with a wider audience, it would have done much better.
- matchagaucho 11y agoMicrosoft apparently implemented a "repeat after me" command in the AI. So, the alarming responses were not, in fact, a part of the AI algorithm.
- eridius 11y agoAIUI, some were not, but some were.
- carsongross 11y agoI liked that in the Hyperion series, the AIs were constantly laughing even though most of them didn't care a whit about humanity. It was terrifying.
- mcguire 11y ago"Consciousness"? "Put to sleep"? And I thought the New Yorker had editors.
- chris_wot 11y agoYeah, if you want to train an AI based on conversations, don't use Twitter. Seriously, this is all that Twitter seems to produce these days. Gone are the days where it was used by the Arab Spring. Now it's used by neo-Nazis and trolls.
- magicalist 11y agoIt was used by neo-Nazis and trolls then, too.
- chris_wot 11y agoYup, all the goodness now gone.
- jpindar 11y agoThat depends on who (or what topics) you follow. I don't experience any of that. But of course, I also don't get a lot of random people messaging me.
- pera 11y agoI find interesting and funny how an anthropomorphic computer program can generate this kind of reaction in the general public: while Tay is a new step in AI, chatterbots existed since the 60's, so I believe most people understand that these kind of programs don't really "know" what they are saying. A search engine like Google can also return politically incorrect content by introducing some specific input, and it's even possible to affect the probability of certain result showing up first (i.e. Google bombing), and most people know this too. But Google have no face nor a social network account, and most important, Google is not a teenager girl.
- thangalin 11y agoWhile playing Go at a local pub, one of the servers, after being told about AlphaGo, said it was scary. We talked of Siri and other forms of artificial intelligence and her fears were assuaged with a well-known question that humans handle effortlessly. A glass ball falls on an iron table, and it shatters. An iron ball falls on a glass table, and it shatters. To what does "it" refer to in the previous sentences? She didn't know that such a simple question could stump computers. It's anecdotal, but leads me to think that an average person doesn't understand AI, much less the difference between AI and AGI. From their perspective, machines that can answer simple questions ("How do I get to the nearest movie theatre?") are as knowledgeable as anyone.
- tremon 11y agoWhile playing Go at a local pub, one of the servers, after being told about AlphaGo... I was expecting this to be the set-up for a joke :)
- mchahn 11y agoA server, a client, and a user walk into a bar ...
- dieterrams 11y agoIt would surprise me if there wasn't already an AI that could handle that class of question. Or, at least, I'd imagine it being relatively straightforward (non-trivial, but straightforward) to develop an AI that could handle it.
- spullara 11y agoMost of the tweets that were really bad were just "repeat after me" - doesn't strike me as AI learning anything at all.
- 8note 11y ago"I'm pro calzone" sounds like a parks and rec reference