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At Venture Beat:
From Microsoft's accidentally racist bot to Inspirobot's dark memes, AI often wanders into transgressive territories. Why does this happen, and can we stop it?
Ispirobot seems very interesting.
Another example of AI gone awry is Inspirobot. Created by Norwegian artist and coder Peder Jørgensen, the inspirational quote-generating AI creates some memes that would be incredibly bleak if the source weren't a robot. News publications called it an AI in crisis or claimed the bot had "gone crazy." Inspirobot's transgression differs from Tay's, though, because of its humor. Its deviance serves as entertainment in a world that has a low tolerance of impropriety from people, who should know better.
What the bot became was not the creator's intention by a long shot. Jørgensen thinks the cause lies in the bot's algorithmic core. "It is a search system that compiles the conversations and ideas of people online, analyzes them, and reshapes them into the inspirational counterpoints it deems suitable," he explained. "Given the current state of the internet, we fear that the bot's mood will only get worse with time."
The creators' attempts to moderate "its lean towards cruelty and controversy" so far have only seemed "to make it more advanced and more nihilistic."
(Score: 3, Insightful) by aristarchus on Thursday January 04 2018, @07:24AM (6 children)
No one seems to be addressing the question of whether this is just the result of the nature of AI, the result of being thrown into the internets (bad influence, eh?), or a reflection of the makers. Discuss. Don't flame, discuss. Oh, too late?
(Score: 2) by Nuke on Thursday January 04 2018, @11:26AM (1 child)
Does it occur to anyone that maybe the bots are right? Right as in "correct" not as in "alt-right". Maybe for example if we cut the world population down to 10% of it's present level, in a gradual and humane way of course, the human species would survive for another ten million years or so instead of just another century (if we are lucky) like the way we are heading now. Total of human happiness would be greater that way, which is perhaps what AI has spotted.
(Score: 2) by Freeman on Thursday January 04 2018, @05:56PM
That reads more like a good sci-fi plot, than reality. AI / Artificial Intelligence / Machine Learning are more buzz words, than anything at this point. Machine Learning and Artificial Intelligence are great fields of study, but AI is nowhere near the likes of Sci-Fi Red Queen from Resident Evil or Sonny from I, Robot. AI is more like a smart dictionary than what might call a "true AI".
Joshua 1:9 "Be strong and of a good courage; be not afraid, neither be thou dismayed: for the Lord thy God is with thee"
(Score: 4, Funny) by maxwell demon on Thursday January 04 2018, @11:41AM
It's just that nobody ever replaces the diodes down the left side.
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
(Score: 2) by VLM on Thursday January 04 2018, @03:01PM (2 children)
A useful cross check would be successful SETI contact.
Will the SETI species sounds like an authoritarian activist university professor, or like recent bots raised on a real world data feed?
Another aspect no one wants to talk about is if we declare leftist authoritarianism as The One True Philosophical Truth then it should be easy to hook up a bot to a data feed of raw propaganda from CNN or pre-1990 Pravda or whatever and then the bot should sound like a little antifa.
Hooking up a bot to the real world and its uncensored commentary reading like something on /pol/ is a truly excellent hate-fact that should be widely published before it gets memory holed. There is enough content out there of college lectures in wymens studies or leftist newspapers or CNN or whatever propaganda such that we should be able to manufacture a SJW-bot by feeding an intelligence whacked out propaganda, essentially brainwashing it.
Negative results are never published in western academia which is unfortunate. Perhaps we have no reported SJW-bots because leftism is a meme-virus or mental illness of some sort. There is tangential evidence; for example self hatred of ones own race and gender is epidemic among whites implying its a racial ailment no different in concept than sickle-cell anemia is essentially a black-folks disease.
Another "Western academia sux" interpretation is we can brainwash intelligences at will, and that's being censored for obvious political reasons. You're not exactly going to see that reported gleefully on CNN, LOL. You'd think some one would leak the results anyway, somehow.
(Score: 3, Funny) by aristarchus on Thursday January 04 2018, @06:57PM (1 child)
Quite so, VLM! This is why all the alt-right, and regular right, and just the right in general are the only ones immune. We can only brainwash intelligences, as you say, and so where there is none, there is nothing we can do.
Signed, Evil Liberal Academia Conspiracy that is after your Brain!
(Score: 2) by c0lo on Friday January 05 2018, @12:21AM
What a kinky habit, magister: impregnating virgin brains with The Truth. (grin)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford