Chinese chatbots apparently re-educated after political faux pas

http://www.reuters.com/article/us-china-robots-idUSKBN1AK0G1

by pseudolus • 9 years ago

72 56 9 years ago

reuters.com

bhouston• 9 years ago

I feel like I am in the future.

lithos• 9 years ago

Were you expecting bots to have more free speech rights than humans?

dogruck2• 9 years ago

The higher level question is how should we respond when machines, trained on facts and data, systematically make decisions that go against our sensitivities?

halflings• 9 years ago

Your model can still be disfunctional even if it is trainer on "facts and data". No model has 100 accuracy, and it's easy to make a mistake when modeling and end up with unexpected issues (for example image recognition systems not working well with people of colour because of either a bias in the dataset, or non-robust methods)

to_bpr• 9 years ago

If the current climate is anything to base predictions on, I would put my money on the answer lying in hard-coding them to adhere to that which is deemed politically correct.

creaghpatr• 9 years ago

Thereby opening a market edge to algorithms that leverage politically incorrect hidden truths.

alvis2• 9 years ago

Can't say our machines are trained based on facts, but purely data. What you get out of it is from what you feed into it.

The challenge we are going to face in this AI era is that the training data can be biased or include some morally/politically incorrect information. Someone can intentionally manipulate the data and make us feel that the response from the machine is trustworthy and factual, which can be devastating if it is used by a dictating government. Mind the alternative facts!!!

reader50005• 9 years ago

This is not like a "fundamental" AI problem; just dont feed the AI shitty data.

losteric• 9 years ago

I feel like that's still an open problem for human intelligence...

rhcom2• 9 years ago

A good article on this: https://www.propublica.org/article/breaking-the-black-box-ho...

We can UNintentionally manipulate the data too even when we are trying our best to be honest.

kobeya• 9 years ago

garbage in, garbage out

TorKlingberg• 9 years ago

You cannot make decisions based purely on facts and data. You also need goals, values, preferences or what you prefer to call it.

dogruck2• 9 years ago

I agree with you. I just don't know how it will work.

Suppose we have a program that approves or denies loan applications. We input the acceptable default rate, and it makes the approval decisions. Then, we notice that the software disproportionately denies applications from a few demographics. What's the right reaction?

Or, what if the software makes hiring decisions, where the objective function is "hire people that will, in aggregate, maximize the corporate stock price."

DarkKomunalec2• 9 years ago

Why should a society tolerate seditious speech, that seeks to topple the very society that allows it to flourish? Free speech should be used responsibly, to promote the values of a society, not destroy them. Few countries share the extremist US point of view of allowing all speech (with few exceptions, e.g. libel and true threats). Instead, they approach it more maturely, to safeguard their values and not allow extremism to take hold.

It saddens me I have to explicitly tag this as sarcasm.

learc83• 9 years ago

It saddens me I have to explicitly tag this as sarcasm.

I just thought you were just a pro China poster until I read that. It's a viewpoint I've commonly heard in Chinese propoganda, and even among ordinary Chinese people.

DarkKomunalec2• 9 years ago

I'm afraid that sentiment is growing outside of China as well, and the disclaimer would remain necessary even in the absence of Chinese posters.

viridian• 9 years ago

I think it's common in communist leaning circles in general. I've talked with a few of the fine folks of anti-fa on twitter, who express similar views. I think it makes sense in the context of the worldview. After all, why let one man's words lead to the mental detriment of thousands?

reader50005• 9 years ago

This viewpoint is effectively British and Canadian law.

empath75• 9 years ago

I'm being 100% honest here. It's not a totally unreasonable position to take, and there are lots of countries that aren't dystopian nightmares who have limits on free speech. I think free speech is important, but I also think that you need an established civil society first that supports human rights and liberty, or else immediately after allowing unfettered free speech, you could end up with pogroms or theocracy.

GhotiFish2• 9 years ago

you are just 100% on the wrong side of poe's law here.

rangibaby• 9 years ago

4. (CLASSIFIED)

Rjevski• 9 years ago

You know that something is very wrong when even an AI doesn't approve of your shitty government.

justicezyx• 9 years ago

Very indicative of the growing ineffectiveness of censorship.

FussyZeus• 9 years ago

I've often wondered how long China can keep up this act of having their cake and eating it too when it comes to operating as a capitalist country with a controlling, pro-censorship Government. Part of me wonders why the people still tolerate it at all.

nileshtrivedi• 9 years ago

Growth solves many problems. ;-)

friedman23• 9 years ago

The economy is growing and people are doing better today than they were yesterday. The problem is that when the growth inevitably stops who will people blame and how will the government respond?

daodedickinson• 9 years ago

Won't be long before neuroscience achieves a whole new level of totalitarian horror and conspiratorial doctors reprogram brains to remove these sorts of bugs.

fekunde• 9 years ago

Isn't that already done, if not at the biological level but at an ideological level via propaganda.

Hasknewbie• 9 years ago

This is hilarious, and if these bots are fed actual user data, this means anti-communist feelings are much more prevalent than the Chinese government wants to let out. I.e. their censorship is not the brainwashing they wish it were, but only a curtain attempting to cover existing discontent.

So: funny, but also potentially good news.

ue_2• 9 years ago

Does anyone have information as to how the party leadership in China manages to pass off what's happening in China as "Communism"? I don't understand how the leadership which calls itself Communist while encouraging wage labour, private property, money and capitalist organisations can pretend to be in any way defending Communism, using chatbots or not.

So how is it done? Do they say "Socialism is what's happening in China, full stop" (which is false and ahistorical) or do they say "China is not yet a Socialist society, full stop" (which would seem to contradict their goal of being a Communist leadership)?

guywhocodes• 9 years ago

Currently in China, the locals don't really look upward, it's an unchangeable fact that they have a corrupt dictatorship. Instead they look around them and try to cheat each other because they think that is the only way to get the head.

I'm not sure they actually know much about what communism actually is. I'm sure they were taught something though

smitherfield• 9 years ago

I’m not Chinese, but I believe the more orthodox Marxists in the Party argue China needs to reach the capitalist stage of development before it’s able to achieve communism (same justification as Lenin’s for the NEP), while the “right” of the Party prefer Third Way type rhetoric of capitalism harnessed to support a welfare state.

The phrase “socialism with Chinese characteristics” was common in their domestic propaganda in the 00’s; I’m not sure whether it still is.

Markoff2• 9 years ago

they don't really call it any name, what's delivered it's that CCP is irreplaceable and that China and CCP are synonyms

you can't love China and dislike CCP

narrator• 9 years ago

Anyone remember Microsoft's Tae chatbot experiment? 4chan got it to start spewing hate speech and 9/11 conspiracy theories on Twitter in no time.

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2016/mar/24/tay-micro...

It just goes to show that chatbots are easy to manipulate. Since the Chinese bot said something we agree with we think that it's somehow showing us a deeper level of truth. Perhaps that deeper level of truth is that humans are easily fooled by confirmation bias?

You'll know that AI is about to take over the world when it can use our cognitive biases to convince us of something so strongly that it would take a human a much longer time to convince us that what the AI made us believe was not in fact true. Maybe this is what Elon Musk was referring to when he warns us about AI that is "deep intelligence in the network".

d0lph• 9 years ago

The article doesn't pretend chatbots aren't hard to manipulate, and in fact mentions the case of the Tay Bot. I don't see anyone claiming that the bot has shown a deeper truth, although I would agree the Chinese government is corrupt.

didibus• 9 years ago

What's the point of a chatbot appart for automated propaganda?

honestoHeminway• 9 years ago

Oh, you can do great stuff with them. For example you can train them on Q&A for technical questions, using Databases like Stackoverflow and a NN.

Chinese chatbots apparently re-educated after political faux pas

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