Will AI ever grasp human speech?

[Unorthodox]

http://www.theverge.com/2016/3/24/11297050/tay-microsoft-chatbot-racist

It took less than 24 hours for Twitter to corrupt an innocent AI chatbot. Yesterday, Microsoft unveiled Tay — a Twitter bot that the company described as an experiment in "conversational understanding." The more you chat with Tay, said Microsoft, the smarter it gets, learning to engage people through "casual and playful conversation."

Unfortunately, the conversations didn't stay playful for long. Pretty soon after Tay launched, people starting tweeting the bot with all sorts of misogynistic, racist, and Donald Trumpist remarks. And Tay — being essentially a robot parrot with an Internet connection — started repeating these sentiments back to users, proving correct that old programming adage: flaming garbage pile in, flaming garbage pile out.


 

 

Now, while these screenshots seem to show that Tay has assimilated the internet's worst tendencies into its personality, it's not quite as straightforward as that. Searching through Tay's tweets (more than 96,000 of them!) we can see that many of the bot's nastiest utterances have simply been the result of copying users. If you tell Tay to "repeat after me," it will — allowing anybody to put words in the chatbot's mouth.



   


 One of Tay's now deleted "repeat after me" tweets.

However, some of its weirder utterances have come out unprompted. The Guardian picked out a (now deleted) example when Tay was having an unremarkable conversation with one user (sample tweet: "new phone who dis?"), before it replied to the question "is Ricky Gervais an atheist?" by saying: "ricky gervais learned totalitarianism from adolf hitler, the inventor of atheism."

 


 


@TheBigBrebowski ricky gervais learned totalitarianism from adolf hitler, the inventor of atheism
— TayTweets (@TayandYou) March 23, 2016
But while it seems that some of the bad stuff Tay is being told is sinking in, it's not like the bot has a coherent ideology. In the span of 15 hours Tay referred to feminism as a "cult" and a "cancer," as well as noting "gender equality = feminism" and "i love feminism now." Tweeting "Bruce Jenner" at the bot got similar mixed response, ranging from "caitlyn jenner is a hero & is a stunning, beautiful woman!" to the transphobic "caitlyn jenner isn't a real woman yet she won woman of the year?" (Neither of which were phrases Tay had been asked to repeat.)

It's unclear how much Microsoft prepared its bot for this sort of thing. The company's website notes that Tay has been built using "relevant public data" that has been "modeled, cleaned, and filtered," but it seems that after the chatbot went live filtering went out the window. The company starting cleaning up Tay's timeline this morning, deleting many of its most offensive remarks.


Tay's responses have turned the bot into a joke, but they raise serious questions

It's a joke, obviously, but there are serious questions to answer, like how are we going to teach AI using public data without incorporating the worst traits of humanity? If we create bots that mirror their users, do we care if their users are human trash? There are plenty of examples of technology embodying — either accidentally or on purpose — the prejudices of society, and Tay's adventures on Twitter show that even big corporations like Microsoft forget to take any preventative measures against these problems.

For Tay though, it all proved a bit too much, and just past midnight this morning, the bot called it a night:

(can't steal the twitter feeds linked in the article, at least from here)

[Lorizael]

AIs are made from atoms, and humans are made from atoms. Consequently, it will take no more than a few billion years for AI to grasp human speech. But, considering all the other phenomenal things humans can do that AI has mastered in the span of maybe half a century, my guess is we won't have to wait that long.

(My answer is probably somewhere between a few years and a few decades.)

[Unorthodox]

AIs are made from atoms,

Hm...

ARE they though? 

Decent argument can be made that they reside in the software side of things, which is more nebulous. 

[Valka]

Ultimately, everything is made of atoms.

And it's getting to the point where I prefer the point of view of the Orange Catholic Bible: "Thou shalt not make a machine in the likeness of a human's mind" (slight paraphrase).

[Lorizael]

AIs are made from atoms,

Hm...

ARE they though? 

Decent argument can be made that they reside in the software side of things, which is more nebulous.

Software, by itself, is just a series of logical steps (perhaps complex and branching and adapting, but ultimately just logic). Software implemented requires a physical substrate, which of course will be made of atoms.

If human behavior is logical (I don't mean rational, but adhering to law-like regularities, however complex and poorly understood they may be right now), then there is in principle no difference between human intelligence and artificial intelligence.

[Lorizael]

Ultimately, everything is made of atoms.

Well, only 4% of the universe, actually. 

[Rusty Edge]

Ultimately, everything is made of atoms.

Well, only 4% of the universe, actually. 

It's the 4% that matters.

I think autocorrect malfunctions say more about the user than the software. Difficult as mastery of human speech may be ( let's face it, many people have yet to do it ) ,  I'm hopeful that technological improvements keep pace with my auditory nerve degeneration. Without combined lip-reading technology, I don't see it approaching perfection. Too many subtle differences. More analog than binary.

[Lorizael]

Yes.

[Buster's Uncle]

God bless you, Lori my friend; this is a very you nine-year necro, and I appreciate the support.

[Lorizael]

We're livin' in the future now, man. Crazy stuff.

[Buster's Uncle]

I been sayin' so since the turn of the century - livin' in the future, yes oh yes oh yes.

Mom complains about where's her flying car?