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WSJ Overstates the Case Of the Testy A.I.
mbeckman writes: According to a WSJ article titled "Artificial Intelligence machine gets testy with programmer," a Google computer program using a database of movie scripts supposedly "lashed out" at a human researcher who was repeatedly asking it to explain morality. After several apparent attempts to politely fend off the researcher, the AI ends the conversation with "I'm not in the mood for a philosophical debate." This, says the WSJ, illustrates how Google scientists are "teaching computers to mimic some of the ways a human brain works."
As any AI researcher can tell you, this is utter nonsense. Humans have no idea how the human, or any other brain, works, so we can hardly teach a machine how brains work. At best, Google is programming (not teaching) a computer to mimic the conversation of humans under highly constrained circumstances. And the methods used have nothing to do with true cognition.
AI hype to the public has gotten progressively more strident in recent years, misleading lay people into believing researchers are much further along than they really are — by orders of magnitude. I'd love to see legitimate A.I. researchers condemn this kind of hucksterism.
As any AI researcher can tell you, this is utter nonsense. Humans have no idea how the human, or any other brain, works, so we can hardly teach a machine how brains work. At best, Google is programming (not teaching) a computer to mimic the conversation of humans under highly constrained circumstances. And the methods used have nothing to do with true cognition.
AI hype to the public has gotten progressively more strident in recent years, misleading lay people into believing researchers are much further along than they really are — by orders of magnitude. I'd love to see legitimate A.I. researchers condemn this kind of hucksterism.
http://arxiv.org/pdf/1506.0586...
The actual paper isn't about AI much at all as it is about making neural conversational models, basically, having the computer chat-back at you in a prompt and natural way. The conversations are less about the computer responding cognitively and more about responding human-like based on the speech patterns fed into it.
The researchers tested two types of datasets, an IT Help Chat Scenario fed with data from what I'm guessing are chat databases, and the second set was fed with conversations from movies as found from OpenSubtitles dataset (not sure if this is a relation to open subtitles.org).
The machine took this vocabulary and then pumped out conversations, and the researchers just looked to see how the new sorting method worked.
I don't understand the linguistic terminology nor the modeling at all, but it seems to me that this is less about AI research and more about just getting bot to sound a lot more natural when they generate responses. I guess this eventually has AI implications, but the research paper itself never even mentions AI, nor does it seem like that's their focus. They're just working on speech, and the statements the machine regurgitated were tested not for cognizance or sentience but coherence. The machine spitting out something relatively snappy isn't the machine getting an attitude, it's the machine finding something relevant to the input that the reader takes as snappy. Such an event has no more significance than when people trained Cleverbot to respond to questions about Hitler with "Hitler did nothing wrong". This bot is no more snappy than Cleverbot is a neo-nazi.