Artificial intelligence still has some way to go

This is huge.

The creator of the YOLO algorithms, which (along with SSD) set much of the path of modern object detection, has stopped doing any computer vision research due to ethical concerns.

I've never seen anything quite like this before. https://t.co/jzu1p4my5V

— Jeremy Howard (@jeremyphoward) February 20, 2020

(i have no insight on anything at all whether "anything like quite like this" has happened before - i suspect that many people in the field have given up their research due to ethical concerns)

quote "anything like quite like this" end quote

if jeremy howard says this specific case is a big deal then i believe him.

but this happened a fair amount in the 60s and 70s throughout science and technology (including CS).

and less prominently, i know tons of people working in ML who vocally refuse to work on vision (which is perhaps the most obviously dangerous application). many of us also refuse to do anything in ad tech, i.e. surveillance and fraud. they didn't work on this stuff for decades (thanks joe!) and then publicly recant though, so they're not box office like he is.

e.g.

If you're wondering why you'd never heard of him, it's because he stood up at the ACM Silver Anniversary party and gave a seven minute keynote about how military-industrial complicit computing folk sucked and should quit. Grace Hopper walked out; he ended up blackballed. pic.twitter.com/xjdvLXtuZ8

— Os Keyes (@farbandish) February 9, 2019

(also albert einstein)

https://github.com/elsamuko/Shirt-without-Stripes

shirts without boolean operators

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iJgNpm8cTE8

Once it deviated from the original my brain just sort of dipped out. There are so many uncanny valleys.

GPT-3 is pretty crazy! https://arxiv.org/abs/2005.14165

I certainly don't understand most of what's going on in the paper, but it seems that GPT-3 is basically the same as the now-famous GPT-2 language model, but massively scaled up (up to 175 Billion features). Apparently this enables the model to perform much better on "one shot" or "few shot" learning across a wide variety of tasks. That means learning to perform a task after only a few demonstrations, the way a human would, rather than the hundreds or thousands of demonstrations that had previously been required.

In addition to things like trivia questions, translation, and reading comprehension, it's shown to do a pretty good job at arithmetic (from a language model that hadn't specifically been taught to do math!), and can write news articles that are almost indistinguishable from human-written articles (human raters have a very hard time telling the difference). Be sure to check out the generated poetry in the appendix (written in the style of Wallace Stevens), which are imo pretty impressive.

parameters, not features, sorry

Important to point out that on most tasks, "one shot" or "few shot" learning still results in substantially lower accuracy than extensively-trained task-specific state-of-the-art results, but this style of lightly-trained learning had been (from what I can gather) a notorious weak point of models like this up until now, so it's a big step up.

v cool

can't do much worse than we are right now

Get ready for people to start moving the Turing test goalposts: https://aiweirdness.com/post/620645957819875328/this-is-the-openai-api-it-makes-spookily-good

fucking hell
https://twitter.com/dog_fakes

This is Soren. He is having an existential crisis, wondering if maybe he isn’t just a lamb after all. 14/10 pic.twitter.com/OHf7kFfQvj

— dog_fakes (@dog_fakes) June 10, 2020

We only rate dogs. There is a broken pipe in the basement. Please don’t send Cheetos. This is a fire hazard. Thank you... 13/10 pic.twitter.com/JqA2yRGcJj

— dog_fakes (@dog_fakes) June 11, 2020

i am deeply curious if the alt-text is human or machine generated

Check Dan's link. The text is AI generated based on the images.

Ah, sorry, alt-text. Ignore my not reading properly. Apologies.

The picture texts are human written. I was mostly just impressed with the chatbot snippets from the link I posted, though I’m not sure I really trust the author not to have cherry picked or “cleaned them up”. The generated dog pictures are not special and have been possible for years I think.

The generated dog pictures are amusingly grotesque. Humans like to be amused. Therefore the dog pictures serve their highest and best purpose, which is not to pinpoint the precise attainments of AI dog picture generation in June 2020 or educate people as to how long it might be before AI can generate wholly believable pictures of non-existent dogs. That sort of evaluation is better made via papers published in academic journals than on a Twitter feed.

are u sure?

Neither the text or the images are believably “human” to me, though the text falls into a sort of prose uncanny valley while the pictures are all just deeply fucked up

i'm pretty sure the text was AI-written (and many of you didn't notice, heh!)

in fact, the entire post dan l posted was all about the text of those tweets - the AI generated visuals barely warrant a mention

Dan I, sorry!

My bad, the dog ratings text is generated, but the alt-text (which I do not see and do not know how to view) is human written. She doesn't really do a good job of explaining all that, tbh. It'll be fun to play with the API first-hand.

and with that, i believe that AI has now reached 100% level

we are now in the age of 3fa23

hold your cursor motionless over the image for the alt text. I would've been more impressed if that was machine-written as it seems genuinely aware.

yikes
http://www.shardcore.org/shardpress2019/2020/06/17/algonuts/

face depixelizer

🤔🤔🤔 pic.twitter.com/LG2cimkCFm

— Chicken3gg (@Chicken3gg) June 20, 2020

One reason this thread title is correct is that so many AI researchers fervently believe in long-discredited pseudoscience: https://cacm.acm.org/careers/244713-facial-recognition-software-predicts-criminality-researchers-say/fulltext

That is so gross. Predicting "criminality" by looking at a photo is bias-reinforcing bullshit.

With 80 percent accuracy and with no racial bias, the software can predict if someone is a criminal based solely on a picture of their face. The software is intended to help law enforcement prevent crime.

Each of these sentences is horrifying. But the second is by far the worst. The amount of unselfconscious intellectual depravity exhibited in this press release is bleakly stunning.

The thing where these companies simultaneously say that their systems are accurate but also impossible to quantify (what exactly is the AI seeing that is a marker for "criminality?") is some scary shit.

Like if it's not racial bias, what is it? Phrenology? Eye separation? Nose size? Hairstyle?

Yes, even a hint of the police putting this into practice is deeply disturbing. I'm also horrified to be (again) reminded that you can advance quite far in CS without learning the absolute basics of the history of science

i hope you all don't pay attention to china

I know you're just interrogating their bullshit, but it is obviously racial bias. Like what could they have possibly trained this on other than mugshots?

yeah totally.

The word "criminal" should be outlawed as a noun. It is an adjective and only applies to actions, not people.

In less creepy AI news, researchers have made an AI that can watch people play Pac Man and then recreate a playable game on its own without any help. Pretty amazing:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3UZzu4UQLcI

I love the two-minute papers YT channel. The guy is so enthusiastic!

"What a time to be alive!"

I have no idea if any of this is actually GPT-3 output or not, but some of it is pretty funny https://arr.am/2020/07/09/gpt-3-an-ai-thats-eerily-good-at-writing-almost-anything/

improved interactive D&D chat bot.

https://medium.com/@aidungeon/ai-dungeon-dragon-model-upgrade-7e8ea579abfe

Example:
https://play.aidungeon.io/adventure/4e00e6e2-1ced-4681-bea4-d5bda66dd4c6

https://miro.medium.com/max/678/1*bs9aJJLm7ZGngUZ81bp1Gw.png

yo
https://player.vimeo.com/video/426819809

i am not an NLP specialist and i don't work on AGI at all, but this thread is correct IMO

listen.... ... the text / code / etc generation from GPT-3 *is* super impressive but you have you remember its basically just a real good search engine

— everest (@everestpipkin) July 18, 2020