The danger of AI is weirder than you think

The danger of artificial intelligence isn't that it's going to rebel against us, but that it's going to do exactly what we ask it to do, says AI researcher Janelle Shane. Sharing the weird, sometimes alarming antics of AI algorithms as they try to solve human problems -- like creating new ice cream flavors or recognizing cars on the road -- Shane shows why AI doesn't yet measure up to real brains.

So, artificial intelligence

is known for disrupting
all kinds of industries.

What about ice cream?

What kind of mind-blowing
new flavors could we generate

with the power of an advanced
artificial intelligence?

So I teamed up with a group of coders
from Kealing Middle School

to find out the answer to this question.

They collected over 1,600
existing ice cream flavors,

and together, we fed them to an algorithm
to see what it would generate.

And here are some of the flavors
that the AI came up with.

[Pumpkin Trash Break]

(Laughter)

[Peanut Butter Slime]

[Strawberry Cream Disease]

(Laughter)

These flavors are not delicious,
as we might have hoped they would be.

So the question is: What happened?

What went wrong?

Is the AI trying to kill us?

Or is it trying to do what we asked,
and there was a problem?

In movies, when something
goes wrong with AI,

it's usually because the AI has decided

that it doesn't want to obey
the humans anymore,

and it's got its own goals,
thank you very much.

In real life, though,
the AI that we actually have

is not nearly smart enough for that.

It has the approximate computing power

of an earthworm,

or maybe at most a single honeybee,

and actually, probably maybe less.

Like, we're constantly learning
new things about brains

that make it clear how much our AIs
don't measure up to real brains.

So today's AI can do a task
like identify a pedestrian in a picture,

but it doesn't have a concept
of what the pedestrian is

beyond that it's a collection
of lines and textures and things.

It doesn't know what a human actually is.

So will today's AI
do what we ask it to do?

It will if it can,

but it might not do what we actually want.

So let's say that you
were trying to get an AI

to take this collection of robot parts

and assemble them into some kind of robot
to get from Point A to Point B.

Now, if you were going to try
and solve this problem

by writing a traditional-style
computer program,

you would give the program
step-by-step instructions

on how to take these parts,

how to assemble them
into a robot with legs

and then how to use those legs
to walk to Point B.

But when you're using AI
to solve the problem,

it goes differently.

You don't tell it
how to solve the problem,

you just give it the goal,

and it has to figure out for itself
via trial and error

how to reach that goal.

And it turns out that the way AI tends
to solve this particular problem

is by doing this:

it assembles itself into a tower
and then falls over

and lands at Point B.

And technically, this solves the problem.

Technically, it got to Point B.

The danger of AI is not that
it's going to rebel against us,

it's that it's going to do
exactly what we ask it to do.

So then the trick
of working with AI becomes:

How do we set up the problem
so that it actually does what we want?

So this little robot here
is being controlled by an AI.

The AI came up with a design
for the robot legs

and then figured out how to use them
to get past all these obstacles.

But when David Ha set up this experiment,

he had to set it up
with very, very strict limits

on how big the AI
was allowed to make the legs,

because otherwise ...

(Laughter)

And technically, it got
to the end of that obstacle course.

So you see how hard it is to get AI
to do something as simple as just walk.

So seeing the AI do this,
you may say, OK, no fair,

you can't just be
a tall tower and fall over,

you have to actually, like,
use legs to walk.

And it turns out,
that doesn't always work, either.

This AI's job was to move fast.

They didn't tell it that it had
to run facing forward

or that it couldn't use its arms.

So this is what you get
when you train AI to move fast,

you get things like somersaulting
and silly walks.

It's really common.

So is twitching along the floor in a heap.

(Laughter)

So in my opinion, you know what
should have been a whole lot weirder

is the "Terminator" robots.

Hacking "The Matrix" is another thing
that AI will do if you give it a chance.

So if you train an AI in a simulation,

it will learn how to do things like
hack into the simulation's math errors

and harvest them for energy.

Or it will figure out how to move faster
by glitching repeatedly into the floor.

When you're working with AI,

it's less like working with another human

and a lot more like working
with some kind of weird force of nature.

And it's really easy to accidentally
give AI the wrong problem to solve,

and often we don't realize that
until something has actually gone wrong.

So here's an experiment I did,

where I wanted the AI
to copy paint colors,

to invent new paint colors,

given the list like the ones
here on the left.

And here's what the AI
actually came up with.

[Sindis Poop, Turdly, Suffer, Gray Pubic]

(Laughter)

So technically,

it did what I asked it to.

I thought I was asking it for,
like, nice paint color names,

but what I was actually asking it to do

was just imitate the kinds
of letter combinations

that it had seen in the original.

And I didn't tell it anything
about what words mean,

or that there are maybe some words

that it should avoid using
in these paint colors.

So its entire world
is the data that I gave it.

Like with the ice cream flavors,
it doesn't know about anything else.

So it is through the data

that we often accidentally tell AI
to do the wrong thing.

This is a fish called a tench.

And there was a group of researchers

who trained an AI to identify
this tench in pictures.

But then when they asked it

what part of the picture it was actually
using to identify the fish,

here's what it highlighted.

Yes, those are human fingers.

Why would it be looking for human fingers

if it's trying to identify a fish?

Well, it turns out that the tench
is a trophy fish,

and so in a lot of pictures
that the AI had seen of this fish

during training,

the fish looked like this.

(Laughter)

And it didn't know that the fingers
aren't part of the fish.

So you see why it is so hard
to design an AI

that actually can understand
what it's looking at.

And this is why designing
the image recognition

in self-driving cars is so hard,

and why so many self-driving car failures

are because the AI got confused.

I want to talk about an example from 2016.

There was a fatal accident when somebody
was using Tesla's autopilot AI,

but instead of using it on the highway
like it was designed for,

they used it on city streets.

And what happened was,

a truck drove out in front of the car
and the car failed to brake.

Now, the AI definitely was trained
to recognize trucks in pictures.

But what it looks like happened is

the AI was trained to recognize
trucks on highway driving,

where you would expect
to see trucks from behind.

Trucks on the side is not supposed
to happen on a highway,

and so when the AI saw this truck,

it looks like the AI recognized it
as most likely to be a road sign

and therefore, safe to drive underneath.

Here's an AI misstep
from a different field.

Amazon recently had to give up
on a résumé-sorting algorithm

that they were working on

when they discovered that the algorithm
had learned to discriminate against women.

What happened is they had trained it
on example résumés

of people who they had hired in the past.

And from these examples, the AI learned
to avoid the résumés of people

who had gone to women's colleges

or who had the word "women"
somewhere in their resume,

as in, "women's soccer team"
or "Society of Women Engineers."

The AI didn't know that it wasn't supposed
to copy this particular thing

that it had seen the humans do.

And technically, it did
what they asked it to do.

They just accidentally asked it
to do the wrong thing.

And this happens all the time with AI.

AI can be really destructive
and not know it.

So the AIs that recommend
new content in Facebook, in YouTube,

they're optimized to increase
the number of clicks and views.

And unfortunately, one way
that they have found of doing this

is to recommend the content
of conspiracy theories or bigotry.

The AIs themselves don't have any concept
of what this content actually is,

and they don't have any concept
of what the consequences might be

of recommending this content.

So, when we're working with AI,

it's up to us to avoid problems.

And avoiding things going wrong,

that may come down to
the age-old problem of communication,

where we as humans have to learn
how to communicate with AI.

We have to learn what AI
is capable of doing and what it's not,

and to understand that,
with its tiny little worm brain,

AI doesn't really understand
what we're trying to ask it to do.

So in other words, we have
to be prepared to work with AI

that's not the super-competent,
all-knowing AI of science fiction.

We have to be prepared to work with an AI

that's the one that we actually have
in the present day.

And present-day AI is plenty weird enough.

Thank you.

(Applause)