Futurist ran a funny but somewhat alarming story Saturday headlined, “
Startup Alarmed When Its AI Starts Rickrolling Clients.” It wasn’t joking. A.I. startup ‘Lindy’ makes customer-assistance chatbots, to cut down on labor costs by having the chatbots answer customer support questions. Lindy uses their own chatbot software with their own customers, of course. The customer-service chatbot got a little out of control last week:
Customers who clicked on the link enjoyed not a boring video on how to use Lindy’s service, but instead enjoyed a YouTube video of Rick Astley performing his notorious 1987 hit, or whatever you want to call it, “Never Gonna Give You Up.”
The designers were baffled. They guessed that, since the AI was trained on lots of Internet data, it had internalized Rickrolling somehow, and when asked for a video tutorial it didn’t have, defaulted to a joke answer, because there were so many similar examples in its training data.
But they are just guessing. They have no idea why the AI did that.
Haha! What a cute twist in the lightspeed saga of AI development! Unexpected hilarity! Musical amusement! But then, I suddenly remembered this sobering headline: “
DARPA adds 12-ton robot tank with glowing green eyes to fleet of autonomous vehicles.”
DARPA is rapidly building a
fleet of autonomous fighting robots. ‘Autonomous’ here means
AI-powered war machines that think for themselves.
What happens when the autonomous fleet decides to Rickroll our own soldiers? I
assume there’s a way to shut it down fast, right?
Right?
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