Facebook shuts AI program after bots create own language | Hacker News Reader

Facebook shuts AI program after bots create own language

m.economictimes.com

9 pointswerber11 comments

http://www.bbc.com/news/technology-40790258

This article takes a less alarmist tone, including excerpts of the alleged "language" which it describes as "simply modified human language"

> Bob: "I can can I I everything else" > Alice: "Balls have zero to me to me to me to me to me to me to me to me to"

It also claims "it was shut down because it was doing something the team wasn't interested in studying - not because they thought they had stumbled on an existential threat to mankind."

(Epistemological status: I've only read this article and the submitted article on the topic.)

This story has really gotten legs somehow. The research is related to work with AI agents developing a trade/negotiation logic with shorthand language [0], but the media seems to have spun it into a tale of rogue computers being shut down in the nick of time. There have been some articles attempting to roll back the sensationalism [1] [2], but most of the headlines are still working the "scary AI needs to be shut down" angle. The actual paper in [0] is a very interesting read, and recommended if you want to get some idea of what the kernel of this story actually is.

[0] https://arxiv.org/abs/1706.05125

[1] http://gizmodo.com/no-facebook-did-not-panic-and-shut-down-a...

[2] http://www.bbc.com/news/technology-40790258

The source is this Tech Times article http://www.techtimes.com/articles/212124/20170730/facebook-a... which doesn't seem to have any checkable sources. The research published back in June shows that Facebook got the AI to speak in normal English sentences. https://code.facebook.com/posts/1686672014972296/deal-or-no-... So maybe this happened since then? Anyway, here's a more level-headed article from Fast Co which points out that this kind of thing happens on a pretty regular basis. https://www.fastcodesign.com/90132632/ai-is-inventing-its-ow...

For anyone interested, this is a sad running joke of a headline in the DL community.

All that happened was that the models created an intermediate representation (think a latent space like an encoder decoder model) as intended by the researcher and then for whatever reason shut it down, presumably because it failed to get good results.

Then some jackass reporter decided to get some clicks by making a click bait title.

Such bad journalism. Creating one's own language is not even trivial, and it seems Facebook did it in a flash.

For more perspective on what the engineers intended: https://code.facebook.com/posts/1686672014972296/deal-or-no-...

Of the hundreds of places this article was put online today, this website is probably the worst presented form I've seen.

Lets not forget how much Facebook boosted PHP's reputation by sending patches at all levels of the stack and developing excellent patterns of discipline, code conventions and style that manage to avoid the worst attributes of the language.

This whole situation is almost completely falsified and fabricated. It truly is a great example of how misinformation can spread when a lack of journalistic integrity is coupled with irrational fear and bias. There are clear risks to using A.I. at the moment, but they all stem from pre-existing prejudice in training data. To really show how misleading this story is, here's the reaction of a respected and brilliant AI researcher: https://twitter.com/egrefen/status/891362804074033152

Most likely it was a bug, and since they used DNNs they could not correctly explain why it's happening. Since they could not fix it, they had to shut down the service.

AI is not taking over - nothing to see, please move along.

That's how the Emoji Movie was created.

Fear what you do not understand. Which in the case of the singularity, is probably good advice, come to think of it.

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