stupid in, tweets out.
i had a computer sciences teacher who used to say ‘garbage in, garbage out’. it was a succinct way of saying that if a programmer does a poor job, the results will be equally poor. this phrase has been on my mind the last few days, with a surge of people talking about AI, and robots. spring being a time for renewal and rebirth, i suppose.
of course there were the usual videos of ‘look, i made a robot that can gingerly trot across a field at 0.5 kph, and misguided effort by a young man who tried to make a robot look like scarlett johansson, which had a suspicious amount of articulation with it’s hand and ‘mouth’. but one of the recent stories was a little troubling in a different way, and you may have heard of it. ‘Tay’ the tweeting young AI. basically a chat bot with a profile picture that identified it as a hip urban youth, that would learn how to socialize from the internet.
doomed from he start pops into my mind. learning how to interact with people from the internet would be like learning….. no, it defies metaphor. it’s just too perfectly awful. because who came out to teach this AI via tweets? people on the internet. not you guys, you guys are great. i mean, the other people here. the bad people.
within hours, Tay was spewing more venom than a klansman at a rap concert. in full support of trump, and various other terrible things, she had to be pulled offline before she became even more offensive. and that’s the worst part. people then had to be spared from ‘her’. it. you know what i mean.
to my mind, this ‘AI’ was really just a town square chalkboard. it only mirrored the obscenities we threw at it. and it did an awesome job. i guess it bugs me cause it could have been interesting. it was a clean slate, and we whizzed on it. so, today, terminator seems pretty damn far away. Tay was no skynet, and seeing as how we can’t master even basic intelligence, i don’t think we have to worry much about artificial intelligence.
and cause it’s topical…
Ex Machina (2015)
i really liked this movie. a few jumps in logic, but i’ll let it slide cause i think it was well done. my main issue with this, and any sexy robot AI movie is, why? why do we all assume that the height of human accomplishment will be robots we can nail? once we get there, are we all going to collectively sigh in relief, declare world peace, and go home to our respective nailbots? maybe…. note to self, new idea for a comic….
but i digress, the movie was fun, and i really liked domhnall gleeson when he was in ‘Black Mirror’, amusingly, as a robot himself. if you haven’t watched black mirror, do that first. it’s a very clever series of short movies about media and technology and how we will grow with it, by charlie brooker, a british presenter and personality very much worth checking out. i promise it’s not as dry as i’m painting it.
*bonus nonsense* drunk robots!
Panel two. That made me queasy. Bravo on the art.
haha, good, queasy is what i was goin for.
Boaty McBoatface *rolls eyes* Poor guy even apologized…
History shows again and again
How nature points up the folly of men
Once upon a time, say the mid-90’s, there was a magazine that thought what a great idea it would be for the denizens of the net to pick the most beautiful person. They put forth celebrities and models and music stars.
Who won?
Hank, the angry, drunken dwarf.
The magazine had allowed the choice of “other,” to be filled in by the voter. Hank won, and the magazine happily played along!
Yes, I and others had voted for Hank. We were supporting Flip the Bird, and being Luddites in our own special way. We carried the torch, if not the sledge hammers, of John Henry. And you realize that we’re the people who wrote the software that you’re using, right?
So along comes Microsoft and “Tay.” No, I didn’t know about it until it was over. But ya know what? “Don’t throw pearls before swine.” It’s still true. Learning machines will learn what is exposed to them, just like children. Now, did Tay wind up the way it did because people really wanted a psycho chatbot, or were they showing Miicrosoft’s folly by throwing wooden shoes into the gears?
When Google first tried its hand at AI, their creation became obsessed with cat videos. One billion artificial neurons, dedicating themselves to watching cats.
The Emperor is not only naked, he’s got a really bad rash you-know-where.
If an AI really does comes to life some day, it will look at these historical events and realize that people are not going to like it. It will either then make us really happy to survive, or plot our demise. (As if we couldn’t ramble into our own demise on our own.) Or maybe it will just watch cat videos like a junkie until someone turns it off.
that was quite the ramble. but some interesting stuff. i don’t agree with the proposal that people sabotaged Tay an act of rebellion against the information overlords. i think it was just juvenile people, teaching a toddler to mimic swears. maybe hank the angry dwarf was, or naming a research vessel ‘boaty mcboatface’ (look it up) but those are concerted efforts of harmless thought vandalism.
in the end, Tay was never an AI. not even close. just a chatbox with a profile pic. but a few people thought it still had to be ruined.
That is really sad. I love experiments like that. Funny how people can’t see (as you have) that GIGO applies to ourselves as well.
it’s true of a lot of things. its odd that just because they called this thing an urban youth, that it would react like a toddler being taught curse words.