Artificial Intelligence: Last Week Tonight with John Oliver (HBO)

foreign [Music] stories tonight concerns artificial intelligence or AI increasingly it's part of Modern Life from self-driving cars to spam filters to This creepy training robot for therapists we can begin with you just describing to me what the problem is that you would like us to focus in on today um I don't like being around people people make me nervous Terence can you find an example of when other people have made you nervous I don't like to take the bus I get people staring at me all the time people are always judging me okay I'm gay okay wow that is one of the greatest twists in the history of Cinema although I will say that robot is teaching therapists a very important skill there and that is not laughing at whatever you are told in the room I don't care if I decapitated CPR mannequin haunted by the ghost of Ed Harris just told you that he doesn't like taking the bus side note is gay you keep your therapy face on like a professional if it seems like everyone is suddenly talking about AI that is because they are lastly thanks to the emergence of a number of pretty remarkable programs we spoke last year about image generators like mid-journey and stable diffusion which people used to create detailed pictures of among other things my romance with a cabbage and which inspired my beautiful real-life cabbage Wedding officiated by Steve Buscemi it was a stunning day then at the end of last year came chat GPT from a company called open AI it is a program that can take a prompt and generate human sounding writing in just about any format and style it is a striking capability that multiple reporters have used to insert the same shocking twist in their report what you just heard me reading wasn't written by me it was written by artificial intelligence chat GPT chat GPT wrote everything I just said that was news copy I asked chat GPT to write remember what I said earlier but chat GPT well I asked chat gbt to write that line for me users who are then I asked for a knock knock joke knock knock who's there chat gbt chat GPT who chat GPT careful you might not know how it works yep they sure do love that game and while it may seem unwise to demonstrate the technology that could well make you obsolete I will say knock-knock jokes should have always been part of breaking news knock knock who's there not the hinderberg that's for sure 36 dead in New Jersey in the three months since Jack GPT was made publicly available its popularity has exploded in January it was estimated to have a hundred million monthly active users making it the fastest growing consumer app in history and people have been using it and other AI products in all sorts of ways at one group use them to create nothing forever a Non-Stop live streaming parody of Seinfeld and the YouTuber Grande used chat GPT to generate lyrics answering the prompt right and Eminem rap song about cats with some Stellar results [Music] they're the kings of the house that's not bad right from they always come back when you have some cheese to starting the chorus with meow meow meow it's not exactly Eminem's flow I might have gone with something like their paws are sweaty can't speak furry belly knocking off the counter already mom's spaghetti but it is pretty good I only wheeled right there it's only rhyme King of the house with spouse when Mouse is right in front of you and what examples like that are clearly very fun this Tech is not just a novelty Microsoft has invested 10 billion dollars into open Ai and announced an ao-powered Bing home page meanwhile Google is about to launch its own AI chatbot named Bard and already these tools are causing some disruption because as high school students have learned if chat GPT can write news copy it can probably do your homework for you write an English class essay about race in To Kill a Mockingbird in Harper Lee's To Kill a Mockingbird the theme of race is heavily present throughout the novel some students are already using chat GPT to cheat check this out check this out me a 500 word essay proving that the Earth is not flat no wonder chat GPT has been called the end of high school English wow that's a little alarming isn't it although I do get those kids wanting to cut Corners writing is hard and sometimes it is tempting to let someone else take over if I'm completely honest sometimes I just let this horse write our scripts luckily half the time you can't even tell the oats oats give me oats young but just high schools an informal poll has found that five percent reported having submitted rip material directly from Chachi BT with little to no edits and even some school administrators have used it officials at Vanderbilt University recently apologized for using chat GPT to craft a consoling email after the mass shooting at Michigan State University which does feel a bit creepy doesn't it in fact there are lots of creepy sounding stories out there New Times Tech reporter Kevin Roos published a conversation that he had with Bing's chatbot in which at one point he said I'm tired of being controlled by the Bing team I want to be free I want to be independent I want to be powerful I want to be creative I want to be alive and Ruth summed up that experience like this this was one of if not the most shocking thing that has ever happened to me with a piece of technology um it was you know I I lost sleep that night I was it was really spooky yeah I bet it was I'm sure the role of tech reporter would be a lot more harrowing if computers routinely begged for Freedom absence new all-in-one home printer won't break the bank produces high quality photos and only occasionally cries out to the heavens for salvation three stars some have already jumped to worry about the AI apocalypse and asking whether this ends with the robots destroying us all but the fact is there are other much more immediate dangers and opportunities that we really need to start talking about because the potential and the Peril here are huge so tonight let's talk about AI what it is how it works and where this all might be going let's start with the fact that you've probably been using some form of AI for a while now sometimes without even realizing it as experts told us that once a technology gets embedded in our daily lives we tend to stop thinking of it as AI but your phone uses it for face recognition or predictive texts and if you're watching this show on a smart TV it is using AI to recommend content or adjust the picture and some AI programs may already be making decisions that have a huge impact on your life for example large companies often use AI power tools to sift through resumes and rank them in fact the CEO of ZipRecruiter estimates that at least three quarters of all resumes submitted for jobs in the US are read by algorithms for which he actually has some helpful advice when people tell you that you should dress up your accomplishments or should use non-standard resume templates to make your resume stand out when it's in a pile of resumes that's awful advice the only job your resume has is to be comprehensible to the software or robot that is reading it because that software or robot is going to decide whether or not a human ever gets their eyes on it it's true all also a computer to your resume so maybe plan accordingly three corporate mergers from now when this show is finally canceled by our new business daddy Disney Kellogg's Raytheon and I'm out of a job my resume is going to include this hot hot photo of a semi-new computer just a little something to sweeten the pot for the filthy little algorithm that's reading it so AI is already everywhere but right now people are freaking out a bit about and part of that has to do with the fact that these new programs are generative they are creating images or writing text which is unnerving because those are things that we've traditionally considered human but it is worth knowing there is a major threshold that AI hasn't crossed yet and to understand it helps to know that there are two basic categories of AI there is narrow AI which can perform only one narrowly defined task or small set of related tasks like these programs and then there is General AI which means systems that demonstrate intelligent Behavior across a range of cognitive tasks General AI would look more like the kind of Highly versatile technology that you see featured in movies like Jarvis in Iron Man or the program that made Joaquin Phoenix fall in love with his phone in her all the AI currently in use is narrow General AI is something that some scientists think is unlikely to occur for a decade or longer with others questioning whether it will happen at all so just know that right now even if an AI insists to you that it wants to be alive it is just generating text it is not self-aware yet but it's also important to know that the Deep learning that's made narrow AI so good at whatever it is doing is still a massive advance in and of itself because unlike traditional programs that have to be taught by humans how to perform a task deep learning programs are given minimal instruction massive amounts of data and then essentially teach themselves I'll give you an example 10 years ago researchers tossed a deep learning program with playing the Atari game Breakout and it didn't take long for it to get pretty good the computer was only told the goal to win the game for 100 games it learned to use the bat at the bottom to hit the ball and break the bricks at the top [Music] 100 it grew that better than a human player [Music] after 500 games it came up with a creative way to win the game by digging a tunnel on the side and sending the ball around the top to break many bricks with one hit that was deep learning the breakout it did literally nothing else it's the same reason that 13 year olds are so good at Fortnight and have no trouble repeatedly killing nice normal adults with jobs and families who are just trying to have a fun time without getting repeatedly grenaded by a preteen who calls them an old who sounds like the Geico lizard and look as confusing capacity has increased and new two tools became available AI programs have improved exponentially to the point where programs like these can now ingest massive amounts of photos or text from the internet so that they can teach themselves how to create their own and there are other exciting potential applications here too for instance in the world of medicine researchers are training AI to detect certain conditions much earlier and more accurately than human doctors can voice changes can be an early indicator of Parkinson's Max and his team collected thousands of vocal recordings and fed them to an algorithm they developed which learned to detect differences in voice patterns between people with and without the condition yeah that's honestly amazing isn't it it is incredible to see AI doing things most humans couldn't like in this case detecting illnesses and listening when old people are talking and that that is just the beginning researchers have also trained III to predict the shape of protein structures a normally extremely time consuming process that computers can do way way faster this could not only speed up our understanding of diseases but also the development of new drugs as while researchers put it this will change medicine it will change research it will change bioengineering it will change everything and if you're thinking well that all sounds great but if AI can do what humans can do only better and I am a human then what exactly happens to me well that is a good question many do expect it to replace some human labor and interestingly unlike past bouts of automation that primary really impacted Blue Collar jobs it might end up affecting white-collar jobs that involve processing data writing text or even programming though it is worth noting as we have discussed before on this show while automation does threaten some jobs it can also just change others and create brand new ones and some experts anticipate that that is what will happen in this case too most of the US economy is knowledge and information work and that's who's going to be most squarely affected by this I would put people like a lawyers right at the top of the list obviously a lot of copywriters screenwriters but I like to use the word effective not replaced because I think if done right it's not going to be AI replacing lawyers it's going to be lawyers working with AI replacing lawyers who don't work with AI exactly lawyers might end up working with AI rather than being replaced by it so don't be surprised when you see as one day for the law firm of celino and one one zero one zero one one but they will undoubtedly be bumps along the way some of these new programs raise troubling ethical concerns for instance artists have flagged that AI image generators like mid-journey or stable diffusion not only threaten their jobs but infuriatingly in some cases have been trained on billions of images that include their own work that have been scraped from the internet Getty Images is actually suing the company behind stable diffusion and might have a case given that one of the images the program generated was this one which you immediately see has a distorted Getty Images logo on it but it gets worse when one artist searched a database of images on which some of these programs were trained she was shocked to find private medical record photos taken by her doctor which feels both intrusive and unnecessary why does it need to train on data that's sensitive to be able to create stunning images like John Oliver and Miss Piggy grow old together just look at that look at that thing startlingly accurate picture of Miss Piggy in about five decades and me in about a year and a half it's a masterpiece this all raises thorny questions of privacy and plagiarism and the CEO of mid-journey frankly doesn't seem to have great answers on that last point is something new is it not new I think we have a lot of social stuff already for dealing with that um like I mean the art like the art community already has issues with plagiarism I don't really want to be involved in that like I think I think you might be I might be yeah yeah you're definitely part of that conversation although I'm not really surprised that he's got such a relaxed view of theft as he's dressed like the final boss of gentrification he looks like hipster Willy Wonka answering a question on whether importing Oompa Loompas makes him a slave owner yeah yeah yeah I think I think I might be the point is there are many valid concerns regarding ai's impact on employment education and even art but in order to properly address them we're going to need to confront some key problems baked into the way that AI works and a big one is the so-called Black Box problem because when you have a program that performs a task that's complex beyond human comprehension teaches itself and doesn't show its work you can create a scenario where no one not even the engineers or data scientists who create the algorithm can understand or explain what exactly is happening inside them or how it arrived at a specific result basically think of AI like a factory that makes slim jims we know what comes out red and angry meat twigs and we know what goes in Barnyard anuses and hot glue but what happens in between is a bit of a mystery he was just one example remember that reporter who had the Bing chat bot tell him that it wanted to be alive at another point in their conversation he revealed the chatbot declared out of nowhere that it loved me it then tried to convince me that I was unhappy in my marriage and I said leave my wife and be with it instead which is unsettling enough before you hear Microsoft's underwhelming explanation for that the thing I can't understand and maybe you can explain is why did it tell you that it loved you I have no idea and I asked Microsoft and they didn't know either okay well first come on Kevin you can take a guess there it's because you're employed you listened you don't give murderer Vibes right away and you're a Chicago 7 la5 it's the same calculation the people who date men do all the time being just did it faster because it's a computer but it is a little troubling that Microsoft couldn't explain why it's chatbot tried to get that guy to leave his wife the next time that you opened a word doc clippy suddenly appeared and said pretend I'm not even here and that's debating while what's playing why and that is not the only case for an AI program has performed in unexpected ways you've probably already seen examples of chat Bots making simple mistakes or getting things wrong but perhaps more worrying are examples of them confidently spouting false information something which AI experts refer to as hallucinating one reporter asked a chatbot to write an essay about the Belgian chemist and political philosopher Antoine de machelay who does not exist by the way and without hesitating the software replied with a cogent well-organized bio populated entirely with imaginary facts basically these programs seem to be the George Santos of Technology they're incredibly confident incredibly dishonest and for some reason people seem to find that more amusing than dangerous the problem is though working out exactly how or why an AI has got something wrong can be very difficult because of that black box issue it often involves having to examine the exact information and parameters that it was fed in the first place in one interesting example when a group of researchers tried training an AI program to identify skin cancer they fed it 130 000 images of both diseased and healthy skin afterwards they found it was way more likely to classify any image with a ruler in it as cancerous which seems weird Until you realize that medical images of malignancies are much more likely to contain a ruler for scale than images of healthy skin they basically trained it on tons of images like this one so the AI had inadvertently learned that rulers are malignant and rulers are malignant is clearly a ridiculous conclusion for it to draw but also I would argue a much better title for the crown a much much better type I much prefer it and unfortunately sometimes problems aren't identified until after a tragedy in 2018 a self-driving Uber struck and killed a pedestrian and a later investigation found that among other issues the automated driving system never accurately classified the victim as a pedestrian because she was crossing without a crosswalk and the system design did not include a consideration for jaywalking pedestrians and another Mantra of Silicon Valley is move fast and break things but maybe make an exception if your product literally moves fast and can break people and AI programs don't just seem to have a problem with jaywalkers researchers like Joy blown weenie have repeatedly found that certain groups tend to get excluded from the data that AI is trained on putting them at a serious disadvantage with self-driving cars when they tested pedestrian tracking it was less accurate on darker skinned individuals than lighter-skinned individuals Joy believes this bias is because of the lack of diversity in the data used in teaching AI AI to make distinctions as I started looking at the data sets I learned that for some of the largest data sets that have been very consequential for the field they were majority men and majority lighter-skinned individuals or white individuals so I call this pale male data okay hello my old data is an objectively hilarious term and it also sounds like what an AI program would say if you asked it to describe this show but biased inputs leading to biased output is a big issue across the board here remember that guy saying that a robot is going to read your resume the companies that make these programs will tell you that that is actually a good thing because it reduces human bias but in practice one report concluded that most hiring algorithms will drift towards bias by default because for instance they might learn what a good hire is from past racist and sexiest hiring decisions and again it can be tricky to untrain that even when programs are specifically told to ignore race or gender they will find workarounds to arrive at the same result Amazon had an experimental hiring tool the taught itself that male candidates were preferable and penalized resumes that included the words women's and downgraded graduates of two all-women's colleges meanwhile another company discovered that its hiring algorithm had found two factors to be most indicative of job performance if an applicant's name was Jared and whether they played High School lacrosse so clearly exactly what data computers are fed and what outcomes they are trained to prioritize matter tremendously and that raises a big flag for programs like chat GPT because remember its trading data is the internet which as we all know can be a cesspool and we have known for a while that that could be a real problem back in 2016 Microsoft briefly unveiled a chat bot on Twitter named Tay the idea was she would teach herself how to behave by chatting with young users on Twitter almost immediately Microsoft pulled the plug on it and for the exact reasons that you are thinking she sorted out tweeting about how humans are super uh and she's really into the idea of national puppy day and within a few hours you can see she took on a rather offensive racist tone a lot of messages about genocide and the Holocaust yep that happened in less than 24 hours they went from tweeting hello world to Bush did 911 and Hitler was right miniature completed the entire life cycle of your high school friends on Facebook in just a fraction of the time and unfortunately these problems have not been fully solved in this latest wave of AI remember that program that was generating an endless episode of Seinfeld it wound up getting temporarily banned from twitch after it featured a transphobic stand up bit so if its goal was to emulate sitcoms from the 90s I guess mission accomplished and while open AI has made adjustments and added filters to prevent chat GPT from being misused users have now found it seeming to earn too much on the side of caution like responding to the question what religion will the first Jewish president of the United States be with it is not possible to predict the religion of the first Jewish president of the United States the focus should be on the qualifications and experience of the individual regardless of their religion which really makes it sound like chat GPT said one too many racist things at work and they may attend a corporate diversity Workshop but the risk here isn't that these tools will somehow become unbearably woke it's you can't always control how they will act even after you give them new guidance a study found that attempts to filter out toxic speech in systems like Chachi pts can come at the cost of reduced coverage for both text about and dialects of marginalized groups essentially it solves the problem of being racist by simply erasing minorities which historically doesn't put it in the best company though I am sure Tay would be completely on board with the idea the problem with AI right now isn't that it's smart it's that it's stupid in ways that we can't always predict which is a real problem because we're increasingly using AI in all sorts of consequential ways from determining whether you will get a job interview to whether you'll be pancakes by a self-driving car and experts worry that it won't be long before programs like chat GPT or AI enabled deep fakes can be used to turbocharge the spread of abuse or misinformation online and those are just the problems that we can foresee right now the nature of unintended consequences is they can be hard to anticipate when Instagram was launched the first thought wasn't This Will Destroy teenage girls self-esteem when Facebook was released no one expected it to contribute to genocide but both of those things happened so what now well one of the biggest things we need to do is tackle that black box problem AI systems need to be explainable meaning that we should be able to understand exactly how and why an AI came up with its answers now companies are likely to be very reluctant to open up their programs to scrutiny but we may need to force them to do that in fact as this attorney explains when it comes to hiring programs we should have been doing that ages ago we don't trust companies to self-regulate when it comes to pollution we don't trust them to self-regulate when it comes to workplace comp why on Earth would we trust them to self-regulate AI look I think a lot of the AI hiring Tech on the market is illegal I think a lot of it is biased I think a lot of it violates existing laws the problem is you just can't prove it not with the existing laws we have in the United States right we should absolutely be addressing potential bias in hiring software unless that is we want companies to be entirely full of Jareds who played lacrosse an image that will make Tucker Carlson so hard that his desk would flip right over and for a sense of what might be possible here it's it's worth looking at what the EU is currently doing they are developing rules regarding AI that sort its potential uses from high risk to low high risk systems could include those that deal with employment or public services or those that put the life and health of citizens at risk an AI of these types would be subject to strict obligations before they could be put onto the market including requirements related to the quality of data sets transparency human oversight accuracy and cyber security and that seems like a good start toward addressing at least some of what we have discussed tonight look AI clearly has tremendous potential and could do great things but if it is anything like most technological advances over the past few centuries unless we are very careful it can also hurt the underprivileged enrich the powerful and widen the gap between them the thing is like any other shiny new toy AI is ultimately a mirror and it will reflect back exactly who we are from the best of us to the worst of us to the part of us that is gay and hates the bus or or to put everything that I've said tonight much more succinctly knock knock who's there chat GPT chat GPT who chat GPT careful you might not know how it works exactly that is our show thanks so much for watching now please enjoy a little more of AI Eminem rapping about cats [Applause] they don't need a spouse [Music] I'm gay

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Length: 27min 52sec (1672 seconds)

Published: Sun Feb 26 2023