The Drum Awards for Marketing - Extended Deadline

-d -h -min -sec

Artificial Intelligence Technology

BBC debunks spate of runaway AI scare stories in the media

Author

By John Glenday, Reporter

August 2, 2017 | 3 min read

The BBC has debunked a flurry of attention grabbing headlines claiming that ‘dangerous’ artificial intelligence is on the march after deploying its technology reporter Chris Baraniuk to delve a little deeper.

AI

BBC debunks media’s runaway AI scare stories

A wave of similar stories swept Britain’s newspapers on Tuesday with the Mirror declaring that ‘Robot intelligence is dangerous’ with The Sun, Independent and Telegraph also weighing in with similarly alarmist headlines – all based on a single Facebook blog post-dating from June documenting a seemingly new language developed by two chat bots in conversation.

By playing one chat bot off against another Facebook’s researchers observed how each program could evolve new ways of communicating which while apparently nonsensical to human observers was subsequently interpreted as a derived form of shorthand chatter.

Fortunately, these discussions were not in relation to world domination but the rather more mundane task of negotiating ownership of virtual items specified by Facebook’s engineers. Baraniuk wrote: “Although some reports insinuate that the bots had at this point invented a new language in order to elude their human masters, a better explanation is that the neural networks were simply trying to modify human language for the purposes of more successful interactions - whether their approach worked or not was another matter.”

AI systems have long been observed to adapt language to simplify conversations by grasping the underlying semantics without being beholden to arbitrary linguistic rules - but of course this would make for far less salacious headlines.

Far from being a threat AI is now proving its worth by purging extremist material from websites such as YouTube before they can be viewed by susceptible humans.

Artificial Intelligence Technology

More from Artificial Intelligence

View all

Trending

Industry insights

View all
Add your own content +