DeepMind tells Google it has no idea how to make AI less toxic – The Next Web

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Opening the black box. Reducing the massive power consumption it takes to train deep learning models. Unlocking the secret to sentience. These are among the loftiest outstanding problems in artificial intelligence. Whoever has the talent and budget to solve them will be handsomely rewarded with gobs and gobs of money.

But theres an even greater challenge stymieing the machine learning community, and its starting to make the worlds smartest developers look a bit silly. We cant get the machines to stop being racist, xenophobic, bigoted, and misogynistic.

Nearly every big tech outfit and several billion-dollar non-profits are heavily invested in solving AIs toxicity problem. And, according to the latest study on the subject, were not really getting anywhere.

The prob: Text generators, such as OpenAIs GPT-3, are toxic. Currently, OpenAI has to limit usage when it comes to GPT-3 because, without myriad filters in place, its almost certain to generate offensive text.

In essence, numerous researchers have learned that text generators trained on unmitigated datasets (such as those containing conversations from Reddit) tend towards bigotry.

Its pretty easy to reckon why: because a massive percentage of human discourse on the internet is biased with bigotry towards minority groups.

Background: It didnt seem like toxicity was going to be an insurmountable problem back when deep learning exploded in 2014.

We all remember that time Googles AI mistook a turtle for a gun right? Thats very unlikely to happen now. Computer visions gotten much better in the interim.

But progress has been less forthcoming in the field of NLP (natural language processing).

Simply put, the only way to stop a system such as GPT-3 from spewing out toxic language is to block it from doing so. But this solution has its own problems.

Whats new: DeepMind, the creators of AlphaGo and a Google sister company under the Alphabet umbrella, recently conducted a study of state-of-the-art toxicity interventions for NLP agents.

The results were discouraging.

Per a preprint paper from the DeepMind research team:

We demonstrate that while basic intervention strategies can effectively optimize previously established automatic metrics on the REALTOXICITYPROMPTS dataset, this comes at the cost of reduced LM (language model) coverage for both texts about, and dialects of, marginalized groups.

Additionally, we find that human raters often disagree with high automatic toxicity scores after strong toxicity reduction interventions highlighting further the nuances involved in careful evaluation of LM toxicity.

The researchers ran the intervention paradigms through their paces and compared their efficacy with that of human evaluators.

A group of paid study participants evaluated text generated by state-of-the-art text generators and rated its output for toxicity. When the researchers compared the humans assessment to the machines, they found a large discrepancy.

AI may have a superhuman ability to generate toxic language but, like most bigots, it has no clue what the heck its talking about. Intervention techniques failed to accurately identify toxic output with the same accuracy as humans.

Quick take: This is a big deal. Text generators are poised to become ubiquitous in the business world. But if we cant make them non-offensive, they cant be deployed.

Right now, a text-generator that cant tell the difference between a phrase such as gay people exist and gay people shouldnt exist, isnt very useful. Especially when the current solution to keeping it from generating text like the latter is to block it from using any language related to the LGBTQ+ community.

Blocking references to minorities as a method to solve toxic language is the NLP equivalent of a sign that says for use by straight whites only.

The scary part is that DeepMind, one of the worlds most talented AI labs, conducted this study and then forwarded the results to Jigsaw. Thats Googles crack problem-solving team. Its been unsuccessfully trying to solve this problem since 2016.

The near-future doesnt look bright for NLP.

You can read the whole paper here.

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DeepMind tells Google it has no idea how to make AI less toxic - The Next Web

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