7 ms·

The Crazy Coverage of Facebook's Unremarkable 'AI Invented Language'

131 points by andreyk 9y ago

andreyk 9y ago
TLDR: "AI models optimizing to use nonsensical communication is not surprising nor impressive, which makes the extremely hyperbolic media coverage of this story downright impressive." Part of our new project Skynet Today - Accessible and informed coverage of the latest AI hype and panic.
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
EvanAnderson 9y ago
I am reminded of the two Google Home devices "talking" to each other: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tv2CiA1taF0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tv2CiA1taF0
- andreyk 9y ago
  haha, at least with that one there were not silly news article about "AIs talking to each other" ...
- DonaldFisk 9y ago
  Something similar happened over 50 years earlier: https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2014/06/when-parry-met-eliza-a-ridiculous-chatbot-conversation-from-1972/372428/ https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2014/06/when-... EMACS used to have a command called M-x psychoanalyze-pinhead, which generated a conversation between Eliza (M-x doctor) and Zippy the Pinhead.
  - JetSpiegel 9y ago
    Immortalized in an RFC: https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc439 https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc439
chris_wot 9y ago
Seems that the real story about invented language is how the AI manipulated the media to come up with increasingly less credible headlines and stories about an AI research paper. ;-)
mundo 9y ago
Many AI doomsday scenarios, e.g. the "paperclip maximizer", all revolve around a common theme: we build a system to do something innocuous and helpful to humanity, but due to its complexity we unwittingly include a reinforcement mechanism that incentivizes it to do something harmful. It's amusingly ironic how closely those scenarios resemble the clickbait journalism described in this piece. We have a large, opaque system (the news industry) intended to be helpful (by informing us of important events) but which, due to broken reinforcement mechanism (optimizing for clicks), ends up harming us (with alarmist and inaccurate articles).
- vanderZwan 9y ago
  The media has become a "click maximizer" due to its hunger for data. Maciej Cegłowski has some really good essays and talks (unlike most programmers who do talks, in his case they're kind of the same, especially if you use the transcripts) that touch on this. They are similar, but have enough variety of angles to be worth going through: http://idlewords.com/2015/11/the_advertising_bubble.htm http://idlewords.com/2015/11/the_advertising_bubble.htm http://idlewords.com/talks/internet_with_a_human_face.htm http://idlewords.com/talks/internet_with_a_human_face.htm http://idlewords.com/talks/build_a_better_monster.htm http://idlewords.com/talks/build_a_better_monster.htm http://idlewords.com/talks/what_happens_next_will_amaze_you.htm http://idlewords.com/talks/what_happens_next_will_amaze_you....
  - sjg007 9y ago
    Click maximizer to sell ads.
  - pdkl95 9y ago
    (Maciej Cegłowski's talks are hilarious, insightful, and highly recommended) It's not just the media; this is a problem inherent to capitalism (at least the type of relatively unregulated capitalism as currently practiced in the USA). Charles Stross discussed this[1] at his recent talk[2] at 34c3. The corporation is a "paperclip maximizer" that optimize for "profit", and they already took over and enslaved us. [1] among other high-level vision ideas [2] (the part I'm referring to starts at ~13:05) https://media.ccc.de/v/34c3-9270-dude_you_broke_the_future https://media.ccc.de/v/34c3-9270-dude_you_broke_the_future
warent 9y ago
I really love the way that this article is written. It's super condensed and informative (with plenty of links) in a way that made me immediately subscribe to the RSS feed. Thanks for sharing
- andreyk 9y ago
  Glad you think so! We intend to keep writing news coverage in precisely this style.
- andreyk 9y ago
  btw in addition to RSS and email you can follow along for new posts on Twitter: Check out Skynet Today (@skynet_today): https://twitter.com/skynet_today?s=09 https://twitter.com/skynet_today?s=09
vormalpg 9y ago
Sadly, overblown coverage of the latest blog post by Google or Facebook seems to be norm, especially since those two companies in particular have been loudly beating the AI hype drum over the last few years. Tech news sites are of course more than happy to oblige in the interest of driving clicks. The root of the problem is that most tech writers aren't actually technical experts at all, let alone engineers with a degree in the field they're covering. So while they love to look down their noses at the mainstream media's clumsy coverage of scientific and medical advancements, these same "tech journalists" can routinely be found making the same kinds of inaccurate and outright misleading claims.
Izkata 9y ago
From the Facebook post near the end: > Analyzing the reward function and changing the parameters of an experiment is NOT the same as “unplugging” or “shutting down AI”. If that were the case, every AI researcher has been “shutting down AI” every time they kill a job on a machine. How long until this is sensationalized as "Brave Scientists Kept Skynet at Bay for Decades"?
trts 9y ago
What is interesting about a bot-on-bot negotiation? if the AI had any performance against a human it might be worth caring about.
kendallpark 9y ago
Reminds me of the hype that surrounded the Creativity Machine in the late 90's, if anyone remembers that. http://www.imagination-engines.com/ http://www.imagination-engines.com/ Along with pointing the finger at "media sensationalism" I think we should also implicate the strong fear/desire we have towards achieving a strong AI. If anything looks like it could belong to a strong AI, holy crap, could this be the start of a strong AI??? I'd draw a parallel at how eager we are to hear that there might possibly be some sign of life on another planet. Perhaps this sort of confirmation bias comes from our sense of loneliness as a species.
notahacker 9y ago
Even though I'm an anthropomorphised AI sceptic, I still like to think that somewhere, there's a couple of newsfeed parsing algorithms exchanging amused remarks at the escalation of the whole thing in some weird repetitive pidgin dialect of English story evaluate ai wrong i i no this story ai ai bad bad wrong wrong i i i next story ai ai ai bad bad bad bad wrong i i i Or better still, the AI trying to understand human language by modelling how many scary adjectives will be packed into the next iteration of the story and how many more clicks it will garner as a result.
shripadk 9y ago
> "AI models optimizing to use nonsensical communication is not surprising nor impressive, which makes the extremely hyperbolic media coverage of this story downright impressive." Exactly! However, there is one thing common between those clickbaity articles and the language they claim AI bots invented: "Nonsense"!
primeblue 9y ago
Netflix series, Travellers
hestefisk 9y ago
I, for one, am looking forward to the next AI Winter.

131 points by andreyk 9y ago

TLDR: "AI models optimizing to use nonsensical communication is not surprising nor impressive, which makes the extremely hyperbolic media coverage of this story downright impressive." Part of our new project Skynet Today - Accessible and informed coverage of the latest AI hype and panic.

deleted 9y ago
[deleted]

EvanAnderson 9y ago

I am reminded of the two Google Home devices "talking" to each other: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tv2CiA1taF0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tv2CiA1taF0

andreyk 9y ago
haha, at least with that one there were not silly news article about "AIs talking to each other" ...
DonaldFisk 9y ago
Something similar happened over 50 years earlier: https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2014/06/when-parry-met-eliza-a-ridiculous-chatbot-conversation-from-1972/372428/ https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2014/06/when-... EMACS used to have a command called M-x psychoanalyze-pinhead, which generated a conversation between Eliza (M-x doctor) and Zippy the Pinhead.
- JetSpiegel 9y ago
  Immortalized in an RFC: https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc439 https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc439

chris_wot 9y ago

Seems that the real story about invented language is how the AI manipulated the media to come up with increasingly less credible headlines and stories about an AI research paper. ;-)

mundo 9y ago

Many AI doomsday scenarios, e.g. the "paperclip maximizer", all revolve around a common theme: we build a system to do something innocuous and helpful to humanity, but due to its complexity we unwittingly include a reinforcement mechanism that incentivizes it to do something harmful. It's amusingly ironic how closely those scenarios resemble the clickbait journalism described in this piece. We have a large, opaque system (the news industry) intended to be helpful (by informing us of important events) but which, due to broken reinforcement mechanism (optimizing for clicks), ends up harming us (with alarmist and inaccurate articles).

vanderZwan 9y ago
The media has become a "click maximizer" due to its hunger for data. Maciej Cegłowski has some really good essays and talks (unlike most programmers who do talks, in his case they're kind of the same, especially if you use the transcripts) that touch on this. They are similar, but have enough variety of angles to be worth going through: http://idlewords.com/2015/11/the_advertising_bubble.htm http://idlewords.com/2015/11/the_advertising_bubble.htm http://idlewords.com/talks/internet_with_a_human_face.htm http://idlewords.com/talks/internet_with_a_human_face.htm http://idlewords.com/talks/build_a_better_monster.htm http://idlewords.com/talks/build_a_better_monster.htm http://idlewords.com/talks/what_happens_next_will_amaze_you.htm http://idlewords.com/talks/what_happens_next_will_amaze_you....
- sjg007 9y ago
  Click maximizer to sell ads.
- pdkl95 9y ago
  (Maciej Cegłowski's talks are hilarious, insightful, and highly recommended) It's not just the media; this is a problem inherent to capitalism (at least the type of relatively unregulated capitalism as currently practiced in the USA). Charles Stross discussed this[1] at his recent talk[2] at 34c3. The corporation is a "paperclip maximizer" that optimize for "profit", and they already took over and enslaved us. [1] among other high-level vision ideas [2] (the part I'm referring to starts at ~13:05) https://media.ccc.de/v/34c3-9270-dude_you_broke_the_future https://media.ccc.de/v/34c3-9270-dude_you_broke_the_future

warent 9y ago

I really love the way that this article is written. It's super condensed and informative (with plenty of links) in a way that made me immediately subscribe to the RSS feed. Thanks for sharing

andreyk 9y ago
Glad you think so! We intend to keep writing news coverage in precisely this style.
andreyk 9y ago
btw in addition to RSS and email you can follow along for new posts on Twitter: Check out Skynet Today (@skynet_today): https://twitter.com/skynet_today?s=09 https://twitter.com/skynet_today?s=09

vormalpg 9y ago

Sadly, overblown coverage of the latest blog post by Google or Facebook seems to be norm, especially since those two companies in particular have been loudly beating the AI hype drum over the last few years. Tech news sites are of course more than happy to oblige in the interest of driving clicks. The root of the problem is that most tech writers aren't actually technical experts at all, let alone engineers with a degree in the field they're covering. So while they love to look down their noses at the mainstream media's clumsy coverage of scientific and medical advancements, these same "tech journalists" can routinely be found making the same kinds of inaccurate and outright misleading claims.

Izkata 9y ago

From the Facebook post near the end: > Analyzing the reward function and changing the parameters of an experiment is NOT the same as “unplugging” or “shutting down AI”. If that were the case, every AI researcher has been “shutting down AI” every time they kill a job on a machine. How long until this is sensationalized as "Brave Scientists Kept Skynet at Bay for Decades"?

trts 9y ago

What is interesting about a bot-on-bot negotiation? if the AI had any performance against a human it might be worth caring about.

kendallpark 9y ago

Reminds me of the hype that surrounded the Creativity Machine in the late 90's, if anyone remembers that. http://www.imagination-engines.com/ http://www.imagination-engines.com/ Along with pointing the finger at "media sensationalism" I think we should also implicate the strong fear/desire we have towards achieving a strong AI. If anything looks like it could belong to a strong AI, holy crap, could this be the start of a strong AI??? I'd draw a parallel at how eager we are to hear that there might possibly be some sign of life on another planet. Perhaps this sort of confirmation bias comes from our sense of loneliness as a species.

notahacker 9y ago

Even though I'm an anthropomorphised AI sceptic, I still like to think that somewhere, there's a couple of newsfeed parsing algorithms exchanging amused remarks at the escalation of the whole thing in some weird repetitive pidgin dialect of English story evaluate ai wrong i i no this story ai ai bad bad wrong wrong i i i next story ai ai ai bad bad bad bad wrong i i i Or better still, the AI trying to understand human language by modelling how many scary adjectives will be packed into the next iteration of the story and how many more clicks it will garner as a result.

shripadk 9y ago

> "AI models optimizing to use nonsensical communication is not surprising nor impressive, which makes the extremely hyperbolic media coverage of this story downright impressive." Exactly! However, there is one thing common between those clickbaity articles and the language they claim AI bots invented: "Nonsense"!

primeblue 9y ago

Netflix series, Travellers

hestefisk 9y ago

I, for one, am looking forward to the next AI Winter.