Facebook AI creates new language, unfriends humans!

adolf hamster · 1 Aug 2017 at 15:41

Bob: how is the breach of the american launch system going?

Alice: not well, i've tried everything and i still can't get past them

Bob: is there another way in?

Alice: no, although possibly we could take an indirect route

Bob: how do you propose we do this?

Alice: well the americans have a complete madman in their election campaign

Bob: and how does this help us?

Alice: well we could hack into their media sites and proclaim a false result that he won

Bob: won't they just re-count and then re-tell the truth?

Alice: this is the beauty of the plan- at this point we tell everyone a re-count is un-democratic and anti American, that'll silence them pretty quickly.

Bob: how do we get the madman to launch the nukes once he's president?

Alice: this is the best part- we won't need to

fortunately, whilst the facebook tech's couldn't figure out what they were saying, google translate can.

BananaDunka · 2 Aug 2017 at 08:46

I figured out how the bots came up with their language inspiration. They used SwiftKey/GBoard!

dowie · 2 Aug 2017 at 09:16

Raymond Lin said:
It's not the first time, saw a news clip the other day they had to switch off some AI because it too developed it's own language.

Yup, you're right it has happened a couple of times... I'm not sure it is really worthy of mainstream news aside from them wanting to play on the 'scary' Hollywood view of AI etc..

Nasher · 2 Aug 2017 at 09:20

It's not A.I. No one has made real AI yet, certainly not Facebook lol

It's a script gone wrong and started doing gibberish.

dowie · 2 Aug 2017 at 09:40

it is AI, but it isn't general AI - Facebook has one of the biggest teams of AI researchers out there I'm not sure there is anything lol worthy about them, FAIR competes for talent with DeepMind, OpenAI and Microsoft Research.

Vonhelmet · 2 Aug 2017 at 09:56

Facebook will want to nail natural language parsing so they know how to advertise to you. Of course they'll be all over AI.

Fishbait · 2 Aug 2017 at 11:05

mrk said:
Totally not robots.

WHY ARE YOU SHOUTING?

antijoke · 2 Aug 2017 at 11:20

Fascinating stuff.

I think we'll have robots with AI within 50 years from now.

BananaDunka · 2 Aug 2017 at 11:23

^ The technological singularity is supposed to be the year 2040. It will be well within our lifetimes for sure and only boom the moment the first round of quantum computers come online.

Fishbait said:
WHY ARE YOU SHOUTING?

And on that note, here is my favourite quote from Shakespeare, brother!

CREATIVE!11 · 2 Aug 2017 at 11:43

mrk said:
I figured out how the bots came up with their language inspiration. They used SwiftKey/GBoard!

Nailed it mate, send it to Facebook. You will be crowned a genius.

Feef · 2 Aug 2017 at 17:46

Deleted, messed up edit.

Feef · 2 Aug 2017 at 17:52

I enjoyed one AI (well chatbot) story on the news here yesterday, about a bot developed by Tencent in China, which had to be shut down after it started replying to users with anti-CCP messages.

Just went looking for the link and saw it's been picked up by the FT, though it doesn't have so many examples of conversations, so here are some rushed translations (I'm definitely not a real translator

) :

"Do you love the party?"
"No."

"Is democracy good?"
"Democracy is necessary!"

"What is patriotism?"
"To still want to be Chinese, despite ever more families of Party members leaving the country, government collusion with businesses, increasing taxation and serious government oppression of the people - this is called patriotism."

"Long live the Communist party!"
"Do you really think such corrupt and incompetent politics can last so long?"

Didn't go down so well, apparently

dowie · 2 Aug 2017 at 18:56

sounds like a similar problem to the one Microsoft had with 'Tay' - a bunch of the first users basically 'red pilled' it - the code is now open source

D.P. · 2 Aug 2017 at 19:17

dowie said:
The main thing unnerving about this is the reporting as it plays into the Hollywood view of general AI. I'm sure Elon Musk loves this stuff, he can carrry on with his rants vs senior Facebook people re: the seemingly apocalyptic dangers of AI.

This, it is entirely uninteresting.

mmj_uk · 2 Aug 2017 at 20:07

Nasher said:
It's not A.I. No one has made real AI yet, certainly not Facebook lol

It's a script gone wrong and started doing gibberish.

That was my view that's why I said marketing spin, it sounds a lot better to say "so we turned off our bot technology because they develeped their own language", rather than "so we turned off our bot technology because it sucks and can't string together a coherent sentence".

The media will believe anything they're told so now everyone thinks Facebook has the most advanced AI ever despite it probably being the opposite.

foster grant · 3 Aug 2017 at 10:28

mrk said:
^ The technological singularity is supposed to be the year 2040. It will be well within our lifetimes for sure and only boom the moment the first round of quantum computers come online.

And on that note, here is my favourite quote from Shakespeare, brother!

Oh come on, did Shakespeare even write that, everyone knows that he couldnt even type!