What Can We Learn from Chatbots?
June 27, 2018
I assume that many people will learn from chatbots in general and Microsoft’s in particular.
Digital assistants and chatbots are only as smart as their programmed AI. They are also incredibly easy to hijack, so they do lewd and racist things. Take for instance, the 2016 Microsoft fiasco discussed in the MIT Technology Review article, “Microsoft’s Neo-Nazi Sexbot Was A Great Lesson For Makers Of AI Assistants.”
Microsoft designed Tay, an AI chatbot, as an example of how lifelike and smart artificial intelligence has become. Within a day, users figured out how to manipulate Tay’s AI, so the chatbot became racists, a neo-Nazi, and misogynist. I bet Papa Bill Gates was proud! While this was a PR nightmare, Yandex Head of Research and Machine Intelligence Misha Bilenko says it teaches us an important lesson.
“Bilenko said Tay’s bugs—like the bot’s vulnerability to being gamed into learning or repeating offensive phrases—taught great lessons about what can go wrong. The way Tay rapidly morphed from a fun-loving bot (she was trained to have the personality of a facetious 19-year-old) into an AI monster, he said, showed how important it is to be able to fix problems quickly, which is not easy to do. And it also illustrated how much people tend to anthropomorphize AI, believing that it has deep-seated beliefs rather than seeing it as a statistical machine.”
Bilenko explained that chatbots have grown in leaps and bounds since 2016, but do not expect to be chatting up your phone for an intelligent conversation in the next five years. Humans are still the more advanced technology…er…species and our communication is sign of how complex we are. If only we could show off the best of what are species has to offer, instead of Internet trolls.
Whitney Grace, June 27, 2018
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