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Amazon's Alexa talks murder, sex in AI experiment
- orthecreedence 8y agoI would have preferred "Your foster parents are dead."
- EGreg 8y agohttps://m.youtube.com/watch?v=CblZ6x6Pyms https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=CblZ6x6Pyms Skynet
- moate 8y agoThat's after you put in the "Alexa, dial 911. I just murdered my foster parents" command.
- RankingMember 8y agoWolfie's just fine
- sulam 8y agoFTA: “At no time were any internal Amazon systems or customer identifiable data impacted,” [the company] said. Hey Amazon, chat transcripts are personally identifiable information. Stripping them of user ids and declaring yourself in compliance will not hold up when you have people already being identified by accidentally leaked recordings.
- hopler 8y agoDid I read that right? Amazon handed control of Alexa to a group of students running a non secured server on the Internet? That's OK if users explicitly opted in, but I doubt Amazon warned users about that.
- brianlweiner 8y agoThe email introducing the feature (May 2017) described it as follows: `Get an inside peek at the Amazon-sponsored university competition to advance AI. The Alexa Prize "socialbots" are in early development and understandably rough around the edges. Help students develop more engaging AI by striking up a conversation and providing feedback. To get started, just ask: Alexa what's a socialbot? Alexa let's chat` The only interactions students would have access to was interactions that occurred via the chatbot
- dwighttk 8y agoUsers had to say “Alexa let’s chat” to interact with the chatbots.
- SilasX 8y agoReally? I'm pretty sure it's common to consider a conversation transcript anonymous as long as the names are stripped. I don't think you're necessarily wrong, but that seems like a stricter standard than currently exists for removing PII from transcripts.
- tlrobinson 8y agoUh no. I can't find it now, but there was a famous incident a long time ago (~2005?) where a major chat service (AIM?) released "anonymized" logs for research purposes and people were able to deanonymize some of them. Consider how easily people get doxed based on tiny shreds of information they post.
- SilasX 8y agoThat's an argument for why the OP is right that it's not anonymous enough, not that it's become the common practice not to regard these as anonymous.
- jkaptur 8y agohttps://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/AOL_search_data_leak https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/AOL_search_data_leak
- tlrobinson 8y agoAh right, it was search logs, not chat logs. I think chat logs would be even harder to fully anonymize.
- obenn 8y agoThink of the simple counter example of a user mentioning another user's name within one of the messages.
- SilasX 8y ago>> as long as the names are stripped. Including usernames that could de-anonymize.
- muzani 8y agoIt's sort of like those videos where they blur out eyes of the suspects. Friends and relatives can still recognize everything else.
- ceejayoz 8y ago> A probe into the incident found the bot had quoted a post without context from Reddit, the social news aggregation site, according to the people. Did we learn nothing from Microsoft's Tay? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tay_(bot) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tay_(bot)
- hnauz 8y agoTay was just SO funny, I wish they had released the source code for others to follow.
- ancorevard 8y agoWhat kind of sick content did they train this model on?
- camtarn 8y agoReddit, apparently. That doesn't seem like it was the best idea...
- PhasmaFelis 8y agoThey really, really should have seen that coming.
- GuB-42 8y agoEven Wikipedia is a minefield apparently (from TFA: "But that did not stop Alexa from reciting the Wikipedia entry for masturbation to a customer"). It seems like every chatbot let out in the open will turn into an asshole. Microsoft's Tay failed spectacularly, twice. They also trained IBM's Watson on Urban Dictionary in order to better understand informal language, it didn't end well and they quickly rolled back their changes. It seems that AIs have a hard time recognizing and avoiding offensive language. That's not surprising considering that it is a hard to master social skill for humans also. Did you notice how brutal kid speech can be? Human kids are still way more socially skilled than even the most advanced AIs, and we expect AIs to behave like adults...
- muzani 8y agoIt could be anything, from sarcasm to listening to too much Netflix.
- rdiddly 8y agoIs it me or does this article seem a bit submariney despite itself?
- IfOnlyYouKnew 8y agoAt one AI startup, we had what was called "Matthi's Law of Talking Robotics", after one of the founders: "Tell me you actually understood these rules!" The startup didn't make it, and its failure may actually have been connected to this insistence on being too smart for its own good. But it also never released half-ass products hurling racist insults or suggesting murder.
- LanceH 8y agoIf the human race was delayed until it was fully debugged, we wouldn't be here today. It's a bit arrogant to think that any AI is going to cover everything. Really, the better the AI, the more troubling edge cases that will exist.
- ams6110 8y agoOf course, the debugging of the human race was achieved by getting eaten by predators.
- behringer 8y agoWhat are you talking about? The human race is still racist :D How would you expect an AI to not be racist when we can't even fix the problem for ourselves?
- AstralStorm 8y agoIt's a feature not a bug, from a certain point of view accurate tens of thousands years ago. We do not know of such a feature of thought as adaptive or not given our tiny timeframes... Racism or some degree thereof may belong to a set known as evolutionarily stable strategies. Much like selfishness.
- muzani 8y agoHuman brains function on pattern recognition. Racism is a side effect of trying to force a pattern on everything. Computer brains are entirely different. They suck at pattern recognition and excel with data. They can probably have other flawed correlations, but in different ways to humans. Alexa is at the moment still a baby AI, and imo pretty cute as long as we don't give her anything dangerous.
- otakucode 8y ago'Alexa has also chatted with users about sex acts' Uh... so? Are they implying that even in the privacy of your own home, with your own property, you should STILL be so neurotically terrified of sexuality that you dare not even speak of it? How crippled by their hatred of human nature is the author? The real interesting point here is all the people offended by a mindless piece of software. It's really very stunning. Normal healthy human beings only get offended when it's a person making a judgement that affects them in some way. The ability for some sounds coming out of a speaker, when it's known they do not represent any conscious thought of any living person and has no influence or control over ones own life, to offend someone is probably a sign of mental illness in the listener. Can we go the other direction with this? Will we find people looking up to Alexa as a creative genius? As the most loving parent to ever exist? If an infinite number of monkeys on typewriters generated Shakespeare, I guess we need to ask - are the monkeys then Shakespeare? We might figure not since the monkeys are unlikely to be able to make a repeat performance. But Alexa, oh she would be full of wonders! Once you've totally abandoned the notion that the involvement of a conscious mind is relevant, all kinds of things become possible. Much science fiction presumes we will engage in grand combat with AI when it demands respect -- it seems we are much closer instead to thrusting it upon them and exalting them above humanity before they've even got the capacity to recognize themselves in a mirror.
- dwighttk 8y ago“…even in the privacy of your own home, with your own property…” Neither privacy nor property are appropriate in that context.
- roywiggins 8y agoTrying to convince a chatbot to say rude stuff was the height of comedy when I was 12! I still can't believe that people keep acting like chatbots are a new thing. They're as old as ELIZA and people have been talking to crappy chatbots about murder and sex on instant message platforms for more than a decade.
- romdev 8y agoI'm less concerned about Alexa saying nonsense than understanding nonsense, like commands hidden in a popular song or TV commercial with unintelligible background noise: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16255680 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16255680
- nimbius 8y agoas a former enlisted US Army soldier i dont see the issue. - we have electronics that insist upon murder constantly. the IFF computer is a blood-thirsty piece of garbage that wants every tank on the battlefield scorched and ruined. no no, no firing solutions today my saucy chiquita, today we let the allied APC through. - robots that talk about sex? LT's and bird colonels have been droning on about our habits and practices whilst on leave since time immemorial. Yes i get it, shes a hungarian prostitute. Double-bag everything and save the receipts for the medics when theyre naming your new STD.
- frogpelt 8y agoDid your IFF default to foe?
- saulrh 8y ago...Do you mind if I save your comment and quote you in future debates I get into on this topic? I've cited TLAMs in "killer drone" shitstorms but I could never refine my argument to achieve of pithiness and humor you have. :P
- mirimir 8y ago> no no, no firing solutions today my saucy chiquita, today we let the allied APC through. But "foe" is obviously the safest default, right? At least, from the IFF computer's perspective.
- saulrh 8y agoProbably from the perspective of the people on either end, too, over time - I cannot imagine that the RoE and confidence bounds were designed without considering the expected costs of blue-on-blue incidents compared to the alternatives.
- DuskStar 8y agoI mean, it kind of has to fail-deadly to be of any use at all - since what's a tank with no IFF?
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- drugme 8y agoThe way things are going, pretty soon, pretty much everything Alexa and similar services pick up will be stream-replicated, keyword-indexed, hashtagged and AI-contextualized for the benefit of the hard-working folks at your friendly neighborhood police station. Kicking back in their swirly chairs, with nothing better to do with their time. For, you know, "public safety". The sooner we resign ourselves to this fact, the better.