Without Humans, Artificial Intelligence Is Still Pretty Stupid (wsj.com)

Christopher Mims, writing for WSJ: The internet giants that tout their AI bona fides have tried to make their algorithms as human-free as possible, and that's been a problem. It has become increasingly apparent over the past year that building systems without humans "in the loop" -- especially in the case of Facebook and the ads it linked to 470 "inauthentic" Russian-backed accounts -- can lead to disastrous outcomes, as actual human brains figure out how to exploit them. Whether it's winning at games like Go or keeping watch for Russian influence operations, the best AI-powered systems require humans to play an active role in their creation, tending and operation (Editor's note: the link could be paywalled; alternative source). Facebook, of course, is now a prime example of this trend. The company recently announced it would add 10,000 content moderators to the 10,000 it already employs -- a hiring surge that will impact its future profitability, said Chief Executive Mark Zuckerberg.

Comments

So are people...

[RyanFenton]

Look up any documented case of feral humans, either in the wild or confinement. If they have a few years first with parents beforehand, they tend to be OK after a period of catching up - but left completely "unprogrammed", they tend to be completely unable to cope.

Humans need interactions on several levels to "become" humans as we recognize them.

It's not at all surprising that computers would need some of that same kinds of interactions to be able to speak to us on our terms. We take a LOT of faulty shortcuts to real logic in order to play our roles in society, conversations, and our shared understanding of the world.

You can get a lot of that odd 'logic' just by building associations - but it takes a LOT of misunderstanding and correction before you can know if those corrections really work the way others understand them.

Ryan Fenton

No kidding

[110010001000]

This is because what the hypesters are calling "AI" is just computers running software. And computers are dumb and so is software. It has been this way since the computer was invented and will continue this way unless there is some magical leap in computing.

Re:No kidding

[eepok]

I wish this itself could become a press release.

News Flash! Recently Discussed "Artificial Intelligence" Unmasked as Stock-Manipulating Hype

Yesterday, insiders from numerous think tanks and advanced computing companies came together to announce to the world that everything they've heard about Artificial Intelligence (or "AI") over the last few years has been false. "There are still no computers that can think unique thoughts on their own. It's all techno mumbo-jumbo and marketing speak to convince investors to invest in one company or the next. In fact, you may have been part of the entire effort to make AI seem more real.," said the spokesman for the group, Nerdy McSoontobejobless. "Chances are that you're in on the act, but just don't know it. If you've ever been asked to prove that you're 'not a robot' by selecting squares that include street signs, you're basically spoon-feeding an database algorithm what a sign is so that standard text-recognition software can figure out what the sign says."

"Oh ya," another representative amended, "Fully autonomous vehicles are still nowhere near ready for mass adoption. It's still going to be a decade or more until they're ready for personal ownership and, when they are, they're going to be extremely expensive."

The NASDAQ has dropped 15% since the announcement.

Re:Out of date article^W summary

[110010001000]

Playing Go is not AI. Here is how computers were able to win at Go: a bunch of people sat down and wrote software to teach a computer how to play Go. It isn't magic. It is software. It isn't intelligent either. It was a single purpose program running on a computer playing a game with a strict rule set. Computers are GREAT at that.

Re:Out of date article^W summary

[Anonymous Coward]

All of these articles are ridiculous. AI does not exist and won't exist for a very long time, if ever.

Re:Out of date article^W summary

[Kjella]

As long as you live in the fantasy that human brains are magical and computers are not there's no point in having an argument, because you've defined the answer "Humans are intelligent and computers are not, hence anything done by computers is not proof of intelligence." rather than the question: "What is intelligence?" and failed to make any measurable definition or criteria. It's like saying humans have souls and rocks don't and expect the debate to be anything other than theology and philosophy.

Even classical conditioning like Pavlov's dogs are proof of learning and reasoning, hear a bell often enough when you're fed and you associate the bell with food. A plant can't be conditioned, snip off the branches stretching towards the sun and they'll just stretch again and again. If you call it AI and it's not learning it's not really intelligence at all really, if you've found a flaw in a game's "AI" and it keeps falling in the same trap over and over it's just blindly executing. The neural nets at least got that part right, walking into a trap will assign that action negative weights. That's above zero intelligence.