
Advances in Conversational AI - moneil971
https://ai.facebook.com/blog/advances-in-conversational-ai/
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EGreg
I gotta say, when AI is able to converse like humans, a lot of bad stuff will
happen. People are so used to the other conversation partner having self-
interest, empathy, being reasonable. When enough bots all have a “swarm”
program to move conversations in a particular direction, they will overwhelm
any public conversation. Moreover, in individual conversations, you won’t be
able to trust anything anyone says or negotiates. Just like playing chess or
poker online now. And with deepfakes, you won’t be able to trust audio or
video either.

The ultimate shock will come when software can render deepfakes in realtime to
carry on a conversation, as your friend but not. As a politician who “said
crazy stuff” but really didn’t, but it’s in the realm of believability.

I would give it about 20 years until it all goes to shit. If you thought fake
news was bad, realtime deepfakes and AI conversations with “friends” will be
worse.

(If you go 50 years out people can start building sleeper bots with
reputations to subvert community consensus, eg about science or politics. All
our systems will be subverted. Don’t believe me? How far are we from that with
“skeptical” blog comments and tweets or sorta-believable allegations ruining
people’s reputations?)

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saidajigumi
I suppose that's how the Butlerian Jihad[1] really gets started, then?

[1]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Butlerian_Jihad](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Butlerian_Jihad)

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slashcom
Links to papers:

[https://arxiv.org/abs/1811.00207](https://arxiv.org/abs/1811.00207) \-
Towards Empathetic Open-domain Conversation Models: a New Benchmark and
Dataset

[https://arxiv.org/abs/1811.01241](https://arxiv.org/abs/1811.01241) \- Wizard
of Wikipedia: Knowledge-Powered Conversational agents

[https://arxiv.org/abs/1810.10665](https://arxiv.org/abs/1810.10665) \-
Engaging Image Captioning Via Personality

[https://arxiv.org/abs/1902.08654](https://arxiv.org/abs/1902.08654) \- What
makes a good conversation? How controllable attributes affect human judgments

And a demo of a bot that they've produced: [https://www.facebook.com/Beat-The-
Bot-212188996195556/](https://www.facebook.com/Beat-The-Bot-212188996195556/)

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rsiqueira
The demo bot keeps repeating: "You do not currently have access to this page".
If anyone has access and can paste a few examples of conversation, it would be
useful to understand if results are good for production bots.

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EForEndeavour

        Human: I'm a huge football fan - the Eagles are my
        favorite team!
    
        Knowledgable model: I've always been more of a fan 
        of the American football team from Pittsburgh, the
        Steelers!
    

While an impressive improvement from "I like football too," this stilted
attempt at incorporating relevant information ends up coming off as "how do
you do, fellow humans!?"

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mrkstu
Yes, still firmly in the uncanny valley.

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amelius
The problem is that they are trying to cheat, rather than truly understanding
what somebody is saying and responding appropriately.

That they are now addressing the consistency of their own model shows that
they are barely able to understand what the model itself is saying, let alone
what the other party is saying.

~~~
Master_Odin
That's the trick of these ML approaches though is that we trade the cost/time
of building semantic understanding for something that appears to work, but
will produce things that make no real semantic sense/understanding.

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skybrian
It's a bit weird that having the agent make up stuff about itself randomly
("I'm a construction worker" or "I build antique homes and refurbish houses")
is considered a good response. Something like "I don't need to make money, I'm
a bot" is what I'd expect. Or alternately, in a game situation, the bot could
be playing a particular role it's given beforehand and judged by how well it
stays in character.

~~~
chrisco255
Yeah I guess it would depend on context. If they want to use a bot for say,
training purposes, it would make sense to play a role. But if I'm talking with
a virtual assistant, I'd prefer not to be lied to.

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KingFelix
They created an Ai bot game as well

[https://www.facebook.com/Beat-The-
Bot-212188996195556/](https://www.facebook.com/Beat-The-Bot-212188996195556/)

They give you a character to play, you are given 2 answers one from a bot one
from a real person.

You respond to the one you think is best, interesting, took too long to
connect me to another 'player' didn't get a chance to actually play yet

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alexandercrohde
Fascinating topic. Unfortunate that a voice in the back of my brain has to say
"Oh I bet if they good at this they'll just use it to target ads better"

