
The 'creepy Facebook AI' story that captivated the media - sonabinu
http://www.bbc.com/news/technology-40790258
======
adityab
This stuff sounds funny now, and some of us grad students had a good laugh.

But I am worried about the future of ML reporting. The "field" is growing fast
and I think we don't have nearly as many science communicators for AI/ML in
particular and CS in general, as in other fields.

I saw comments by lots of genuinely afraid laypeople who were producing
platitudes to the effect that scientists don't have common sense, that we're
"playing god"... etc. Also scary stuff things like the need to take action
against evil scientists before it's too late.

There are genuinely bad things that could come of such reporting. Like knee-
jerk regulations being imposed on AI _research_ due to irrational fears, or
worse - scared and angry vigilantes going after researchers personally.

It's not practical to educate everyone in ML, I wonder how we will solve this
problem.

~~~
bduerst
We saw the same layman rhetoric with GMO crops in the late 90's to early 00's.
Slippery-slope nightmare scenarios, accusations of playing god, corporate
greed run unchecked, etc. It seems to be a recurrent theme for new technology.

Typically, reasonable people don't buy into most of these scare tactics, even
if the tactics are being used as clickbait.

~~~
shadykiller
We've always played with nature without understanding the repercussions. Some
turned out good and some bad. So the best strategy is to have a kill switch.

Unfortunately GMO has turned out to be a bad experiment(widespread usage of
glyphosates) which has badly affected our environment and health and we are
nowhere close to killing it.

[https://gmo-awareness.com/resources/glyphosate/](https://gmo-
awareness.com/resources/glyphosate/)

~~~
tonmoy
Do you have any better resources to claim that "GMO has turned out to be a bad
experiment"? Not only does "gmo-awareness.com" not create any confidence for
me, but the points in the link are about a chemical substance and not really
an impact of the GMO seeds directly. Moreover, all the points listed seem to
be common for most chemical pesticides or herbicides if not used in moderation

~~~
Mediterraneo10
> The points in the link are about a chemical substance and not really an
> impact of the GMO seeds directly.

The whole point of Roundup-ready varieties is that you can douse the plants in
Roundup and they will still grow well. Sure, there may be other GMO varieties
that come without problems, but these particular GMO seeds are inherently
linked with glyphosates.

------
cwyers
This is better than most articles I've seen on this subject, but it still
falls victim to AI hype.

> Although some reports insinuate that the bots had at this point invented a
> new language in order to elude their human masters, a better explanation is
> that the neural networks had simply modified human language for the purposes
> of more efficient interaction.

From the Gizmodo article it links to (which is also okay, but not great):

> “Agents will drift off understandable language and invent codewords for
> themselves,” FAIR visiting researcher Dhruv Batra said. “Like if I say ‘the’
> five times, you interpret that to mean I want five copies of this item. This
> isn’t so different from the way communities of humans create shorthands.”

Except... this isn't shorthand. "I want five balls" is shorter than "Give me
balls the the the the the," or whatever else it could come up with. It's not
more efficient. It's just... dumb. The bots don't actually understand the
words the way humans do. Because they don't understand words and language,
they're using the words as tokens. It's this primitive level of communication
that just happens to have words assigned to it. Even the calmer takes on this
are anthromorphizing the machines too much and attributing intelligence to the
complete lack thereof.

~~~
simias
It depends what you're optimizing for I guess. If you want to reduce the
length of the sequence then "Give me balls the the the the the" is silly but
if the point is to reduce the vocabulary then it makes sense.

After all most machines currently communicate by exchanging sequences of
exactly two symbols, 0 and 1, not some complex phonology. Maybe when bandwidth
is not as constrained as human speech it's actually more efficient to reduce
the vocabulary and increase the symbol rate.

IIRC there's something similar going on with real human languages too. For
instance Chinese usually takes fewer phonemes than Spanish to express the same
information. However Spanish speakers tend to speak significantly faster than
the Chinese to "make up" for it. The fact that Spanish uses more sound to
carry the same amount of informations makes it more resilient to "data loss"
and allows a faster speech rate.

~~~
cwyers
So, I don't disagree with that. What I disagree with is the characterization
of the machine as doing any of that. "[H]ad simply modified human language for
the purposes of more efficient interaction" anthropomorphizes the hell out of
the machine, and confuses the issue. The machines don't understand English or
any other human language and weren't modifying it to any sort of purpose. The
machines were given a training corpus and made to communicate between agents
and something fell out, and the exact manner of it was about as intentional as
an apple falling out of a tree intends to hit this branch or that branch on
the way down.

------
spyspy
Makes sense.

Bot-0 creates a message that's slightly incorrect to a human reader. Bot-1
reads and interprets it correctly. Bot-0 gets a reasonable response from Bot-1
and thus increasing the confidence in how it structured its original message.
Millions of iterations later and you get a weird corpus with weird structure.

You can achieve the same thing with two young children that spend a lot of
time together e.g. twins.

~~~
mrec
> _You can achieve the same thing with two young children that spend a lot of
> time together e.g. twins._

Sometimes taken to extremes:

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

~~~
chillee
Wow the linked article is quite something:

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

> According to Wallace, the girls had a longstanding agreement that if one
> died, the other must begin to speak and live a normal life. During their
> stay in the hospital, they began to believe that it was necessary for one of
> them to die, and after much discussion, Jennifer agreed to be the
> sacrifice.[4] In March 1993, the twins were transferred from Broadmoor to
> the more open Caswell Clinic in Bridgend, Wales; on arrival Jennifer could
> not be roused.[5] She was taken to the hospital where she died soon after of
> acute myocarditis, a sudden inflammation of the heart.[5] There was no
> evidence of drugs or poison in her system, and her death remains a
> mystery.[6] At the inquest, June revealed that Jennifer had been acting
> strangely for about a day before their release, her speech was slurring, and
> she said that she was dying. On the trip to Caswell, she had slept in June's
> lap with her eyes open.[3][7] On a visit a few days later, Wallace recounted
> that June "was in a strange mood". She said, "I'm free at last, liberated,
> and at last Jennifer has given up her life for me".[5]

~~~
digi_owl
So one of them actually willed herself to die?!

~~~
SmellyGeekBoy
Or she had been experiencing chest pain and had a pretty good idea that she
was going to die anyway.

------
gabrielgoh
A fascinating aspect of this entire kerfuffle is that the meta story, the one
about sensationalism and "bad journalism" is too, a form of media
sensationalism that plays to the ears of a more sober and skeptical audience
who wants news about "media sensationalism" and "AI hype".

A bit of digging reveals that no serious news outlet really got this wrong
(correct me if I'm wrong!), and most of the sensationalist headlines were from
British tabloids

[https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2017/06/what-...](https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2017/06/what-
an-ais-non-human-language-actually-looks-like/530934/)

[http://www.mirror.co.uk/tech/robot-intelligence-dangerous-
ex...](http://www.mirror.co.uk/tech/robot-intelligence-dangerous-experts-
warning-10908711)

but even more surprisingly, the articles themselves demonstrated a fairly
sober understanding of what is going on. The only mistake they made was
spinning a mundane story way out of proportion, something tabloids literally
every day, and have done since their conception.

~~~
bahjoite
A minor point: theatlantic.com isn't a British tabloid.

~~~
awkwarddaturtle
It is a propaganda outlet now owned by Steve Jobs' wife.

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

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

The move by tech industry people into media/propaganda is rather worrying.

------
nothis
IMO it's also a little condescending to claim readers couldn't tell that this
isn't about "robots trying to kill us". The creepy part, the reason the people
who actually DO know their shit bothered to ever publish these findings, is
that machine learning can lead to code where it's practically impossible for a
human being to understand how it gets to an end result. It IS creepy to find
an AI developing a language we can no longer follow!

Yea, the newspaper illustrations with the Terminator (oh, hey, this article
does it, too, but I guess it doesn't count because it's "ironical") are
exaggerations but who doesn't get that?

------
cosinetau
Does anyone else think that journals, and periodicals misrepresenting
something like this is getting to be too much like journalistic terrorism? Or
would calling them Luddites be a better characterization?

~~~
wonderwonder
I don't think it's either. I think that for many now journalism is reduced to
counting clicks and selling ads. This is why legitimately "fake news" has
gained so much sway especially on social networks. Print a story with a
headline that people want to read and they will click on it, truth takes a
backseat to currency. Easiest way to do that is to write something supporting
someones deeply held belief or fear.

Now I don't think that the major news organizations purposely publish fake
stories but as another poster said, a little sensationalism while conveying an
otherwise truthful story helps to encourage clicks and improves a papers
bottom line.

With the ongoing demise of print and the rise of competition on the web,
legitimate news organizations are attempting to compete and survive and often
that means employing some of the methods that we find distasteful but are
proven to work.

~~~
lukas099
I'll bet an AI clickbait-generator could create a ton of revenue. I wonder
what kind of sensationalist clickbait _that_ would inspire?

------
Jedi72
My Mum phoned me last night across 3 time zones because she heard about this
and was worried. The people writing these articles are responsible for a lot
of fear mongering amongst lay people.

------
imh
This has all of my favorite media failings in one! It's like bingo! We have
the game of telephone, with outlets reporting on outlets reporting on outlets,
each diverging further from the primary source. We have attention grabbing
headlines completely removed from the article content. Complete lack of
oversight, where if you asked any expert they'd say "this is totally wrong."
Big media names lending their platforms to "contributors" providing fake
credibility with none of the accountability. All of that going viral despite
it being complete nonsense!

Yay 2017.

------
amelius
Why don't we just make user-tracking for advertisement purposes illegal?

That would solve a lot of problems, because the only reason these companies
are interested in our behavior is to influence us.

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wonder_bread
Seems like a tactful play by FB to promote their efforts by letting this
'event' leak out to the press

~~~
MichaelMoser123
And the press is searching for stories, it's August and lot of newsmakers are
out for vacations...

~~~
schoen
A longstanding tradition:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Silly_season](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Silly_season)

------
spraak
Could someone at Facebook have paid for this article to be written?

------
grillvogel
the bots learned how to lie. how is that not terrifying?

~~~
visarga
My /dev/random sometimes outputs poetry. How's that not endearing?

~~~
red75prime
It is not goal directed.

