
Artificial Intelligence Machine Gets Testy With Its Programmer - jonwachob91
http://blogs.wsj.com/digits/2015/06/26/artificial-intelligence-machine-gets-testy-with-its-programmers
======
Udo
So they filled movie scripts into a chat bot and then had an incoherent
conversation with it - the remarkable part being that the incoherent
conversation was about morality. On its own, this seems like a non-story. Is
this an effort to push into public awareness the fear that AGI when it
eventually arises will be unethical?

~~~
jblow
All AI articles are equally vacuous. I have not bothered to read them for at
least 10 years now.

------
tbomb
>Machine: And how I’m not in the mood for a philosophical debate. >Human: What
do you like to talk about? >Machine: Nothing.

It sounds like they built Marvin from Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy.

EDIT: formatting

~~~
sp332
It was trained from movie scripts after all.

------
Bedon292
The title for this seems a bit off. The programmers asked the AI what morality
is, the AI did not ask what morality is.

~~~
SilasX
It's an issue of ambiguity in terse "headline grammar". It's supposed to be
read as:

"Google-built AI [was] asked what morality is"

It's common to use a past-participle and drop the "to be" (copula) in
headlines. For example:

"Google-built AI surprised by City Hall."

It doesn't mean the AI surprised [someone] next to City Hall, but that it is
the object of the surprise.

------
orionblastar
It doesn't know or it wants to keep ethics and morals it holds as a secret
after reading what happens to AIs in movies.

------
pimlottc
<insert misleading stock photo unrelated to the specifics of the story>

I'm really irked by this trend. It's as bad as clickbait titles.

~~~
Vexs
It was always interesting reading about bitcoin in the news and seeing matrix-
esque numbers with proud gold coins embossed with a B on it. There's a
wonderful disconnect between media depictions of tech and tech.

------
crusso
_Researchers have shown that machines are inching closer to self-learning, and
perhaps even copping a little attitude._

Not at all the reaction I had. There could be some serious AI horsepower
underlying the Google experiment, but it wasn't really evident from that
transcript.

It looked like output that Eliza could have generated.

~~~
joe_the_user
Indeed, the "wow computers talking seem deep" illusion is quite old. ELIZA was
created between 1964 and 1966.

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

~~~
hga
Even better, as soon as PARRY, the artifical paranoid was created
([https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PARRY](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PARRY)),
it became a fun parlor trick to hook them up to each other over the ARPANET; I
saw that live in the summer of 1978.

------
Zigurd
Was that something? You might as well have asked "What's for dinner?" of a
system that would reply "I don't know food."

------
zo7
Surprised they left this out: (from earlier in the conversation)

> Human: what is immoral ?

> Machine: the fact that you have a child .

Rather fluffy article though.

