
The Crazy Coverage of Facebook's Unremarkable 'AI Invented Language' - andreyk
http://www.skynettoday.com/content/news/facebook-chatbot-language/
======
mundo
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
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....](http://idlewords.com/talks/what_happens_next_will_amaze_you.htm)

~~~
twic
> The media has become a "click maximizer" due to its hunger for data.

Oh my god, it's even a pay-per-click maximiser. That is just too good.

~~~
darawk
...is it possible for a pun to distill the zeitgeist more perfectly than that?

------
Izkata
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"?

------
notahacker
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.

------
EvanAnderson
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)

~~~
DonaldFisk
Something similar happened over 50 years earlier:

[https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2014/06/when-...](https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2014/06/when-
parry-met-eliza-a-ridiculous-chatbot-conversation-from-1972/372428/)

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
Immortalized in an RFC:
[https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc439](https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc439)

------
warent
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
Glad you think so! We intend to keep writing news coverage in precisely this
style.

------
chris_wot
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. ;-)

------
kendallpark
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.

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

------
shripadk
> "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"!

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

------
vormalpg
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.

------
andreyk
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.

