Bots talking but it’s not exactly Skynet
For some, the idea of artificially intelligent bots that can invent languages of their own and not teach them to us invokes images of Skynet from the Terminator movies.
The recent spat between Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg about the future of AI made it clear that while the Tesla founder fears that AI could get out of control and become a danger to humans, the Facebook chief executive believes it will be only a useful service enhancement.
I’m with Zuckerberg in this debate. After decades of machine learning experiments, even the best of the chatbots are strikingly bad at all but the simplest communication.
Watching them should induce optimism in anyone who uses words creatively, from writers to politicians to fast-talking sales professionals.
To take over the world, an artificially intelligent entity should be able to learn from thousands of people. And even those chatbots that get the opportunity display all the intelligence of an ostrich.
We usually learn about AI chatbots when they fail spectacularly, such as Microsoft’s catastrophe with Tay, the Twitter bot that quickly picked up a racist mindset from the people who trained it.
Or the two bots taken offline by China’s Tencent – local product BabyQ and Microsoft-developed XiaoBing: Tested on their Chinese patriotism, the former answered ‘‘Do you love the Communist Party’’ with a stark ‘‘No’’; ‘‘My China dream is to go to America,’’ said the second.
A year after Tay, bots still naively repeat whatever they’re taught. There have been nice attempts to turn that inescapable bug into a feature. Eugenia Kuyda, a Russian entrepreneur, trained a bot on a vast body of text messages from a dead friend to create an illusion of talking with him.
With this project’s sequel, the app Replika, there is no Tay-like risk: You train your own ‘‘digital friend’’, which is fine until you get bored, as kids get with virtual pets.
But bots can’t feel. If they could, communicating with humans would be frustrating for them.
Accosted with sarcasm, logical leaps, manipulative tactics, drunkenness, non-mainstream views, biases, cultural differences, age-specific behaviours, political correctness, specialised knowledge, stylistic quirks, imperfect command of languages – all this endless variety – all they can do is fall back on stock responses.
So, in a way, bots are best at talking to other bots. They ‘‘invent a language’’ when set a relatively simple task and left to converge toward a solution.
The findings have been exciting to those interested in the origins of language, but they aren’t about any kind of diabolical superintelligence.
Our distant ancestors, who were not particularly smart, also found ways to talk to folks from other tribes, and to bargain with them if necessary.
That machines can do it, too, when set a specific task on which they must work until a set outcome is achieved, is a far cry from Skynet dystopia.
It shouldn’t hurt or alarm us to know that it’s easier for software to talk to other software than to us: There is less, not more, complexity involved.
Facebook is on the cutting edge of AI research because it wants to own commercial communications (thus the bargaining experiment).
Though a bot cannot be trained as a universal salesman, one can be seriously good at closing a particular kind of sale with an interesting buyer. It’s likely that, at some point in the future, we will be dealing with such bots on a daily basis.
But don’t expect bots to kowtow convincingly to the Chinese Communist Party or get much better at punditry than Thinkpiece Bot on Twitter, invent compelling new philosophies, or start wars.
The danger is not in the AI itself but in over-empowering the geeks who create it. We do that by believing in their omnipotence. – Washington Post