Tag: Artificial Intelligence

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Ethics in AI for Kids and Teens

In summer 2019, Blakeley Payne ran a very special course at MIT. According to an article in Quartz magazine, the graduate student had created an AI ethics curriculum to make kids and teens aware of how AI systems mediate their everyday lives. “By starting early, she hopes the kids will become more conscious of how AI is designed and how it can manipulate them. These lessons also help prepare them for the jobs of the future, and potentially become AI designers rather than just consumers.” (Quartz, 4 September 2019) Not everyone is convinced that artificial intelligence is the right topic for kids and teens. “Some argue that developing kindness, citizenship, or even a foreign language might serve students better than learning AI systems that could be outdated by the time they graduate. But Payne sees middle school as a unique time to start kids understanding the world they live in: it’s around ages 10 to 14 year that kids start to experience higher-level thoughts and deal with complex moral reasoning. And most of them have smartphones loaded with all sorts of AI.” (Quartz, 4 September 2019) There is no doubt that the MIT course could be a role model for schools around the world. The renowned university once again seems to be setting new standards.

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Fighting Deepfakes with Deepfakes

A deepfake (or deep fake) is a picture or video created with the help of artificial intelligence that looks authentic but is not. Also the methods and techniques in this context are labeled with the term. Machine learning and especially deep learning are used. With deepfakes one wants to create objects of art and visual objects or means for discreditation, manipulation and propaganda. Politics and pornography are therefore closely interwoven with the phenomenon. According to Futurism, Facebook is teaming up with a consortium of Microsoft researchers and several prominent universities for a “Deepfake Detection Challenge”. “The idea is to build a data set, with the help of human user input, that’ll help neural networks detect what is and isn’t a deepfake. The end result, if all goes well, will be a system that can reliably fake videos online. Similar data sets already exist for object or speech recognition, but there isn’t one specifically made for detecting deepfakes yet.” (Futurism, 5 September 2019) The winning team will get a prize – presumably a higher sum of money. Facebook is investing a total of 10 million dollars in the competition.

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An AI System for Multiple-choice Tests

According to the New York Times, the Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence unveiled a new system that correctly answered more than 90 percent of the questions on an eighth-grade science test and more than 80 percent on a 12th-grade exam. Is it really a breakthrough for AI technology, as the title of the article claims? This is a subject of controversy among experts. The newspaper is optimistic: “The system, called Aristo, is an indication that in just the past several months researchers have made significant progress in developing A.I. that can understand languages and mimic the logic and decision-making of humans.” (NYT, 4 September 2019) Aristo was built for multiple-choice tests. “It took standard exams written for students in New York, though the Allen Institute removed all questions that included pictures and diagrams.” (NYT, 4 September 2019) Some questions could be answered by simple information retrieval. There are numerous systems that access Google and Wikipedia, including artifacts of machine ethics like LIEBOT and BESTBOT. But for the answers to other questions logical thinking was required. Perhaps Aristo is helping to abolish multiple-choice tests – not so much because it can solve them, but because they are often not effective.

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The Resurrection of Dead Authors

lyrikline.org is an interesting and touching project. The writers themselves read their works. You can listen to Ingeborg Bachmann as well as Paul Celan. Spoken literature has been booming in Europe and the USA for about 15 years. The Chinese discovered audio books some time ago. Basically it is time-consuming and expensive to produce such books professionally. Moreover, the authors are not always available. The Chinese search engine Sogou wants to solve this problem with the help of visualization technology and artificial intelligence. It creates avatars of the authors who speak with the voice of the authors. “At the China Online Literature+ conference, the company announced that the first two authors to receive this avatar treatment will be Yue Guan and Bu Xin Tian Shang Diao Xian Bing … If these first AI author avatars are well-received, others could follow – and that could just be the jumping-off point. A company could produce book readings by deceased authors, for example, as long as enough audio and video footage exists. Eventually, they could even incorporate hologram technology to really give bibliophiles the feeling of being at their favorite author’s reading.” (futurism.com, 15 August 2019) So you could have Ingeborg Bachmann or Charles Bukowski read all of their own texts and watch them, many years after their death. Whether the results really sound like the originals, whether they influence us just as emotionally, can be doubted. But there is no doubt that this is an exciting project.

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The Relationship between Artificial Intelligence and Machine Ethics

Artificial intelligence has human or animal intelligence as a reference and attempts to represent it in certain aspects. It can also try to deviate from human or animal intelligence, for example by solving problems differently with its systems. Machine ethics is dedicated to machine morality, producing it and investigating it. Whether one likes the concepts and methods of machine ethics or not, one must acknowledge that novel autonomous machines emerge that appear more complete than earlier ones in a certain sense. It is almost surprising that artificial morality did not join artificial intelligence much earlier. Especially machines that simulate human intelligence and human morality for manageable areas of application seem to be a good idea. But what if a superintelligence with a supermorality forms a new species superior to ours? That’s science fiction, of course. But also something that some scientists want to achieve. Basically, it’s important to clarify terms and explain their connections. This is done in a graphics that was published in July 2019 on informationsethik.net and is linked here.

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China’s Brain Drain

“China’s AI talent base is growing, and then leaving” – this is what Joy Dantong Ma writes in an article with the same title. Artificial intelligence is promoted in the People’s Republic in various ways. Money is invested in technologies, institutions, and people. “China has been successful in producing AI talent, evidenced by the rapid growth of AI human capital over the last decade.” (MacroPolo, 30 July 2019) This seems to be good news for the country in the Far East. But the study to which the article refers comes to a different conclusion. While “Beijing has cultivated an army of top AI talent, well over half of that talent eventually ended up in America rather than getting hired by domestic companies and institutions”. “That’s because most of the government resources went into expanding the talent base rather than creating incentives and an environment in which they stay.” (MacroPolo, 30 July 2019) According to Joy Dantong Ma, Beijing seems to have recognized its failure in retaining talent. “The well-known New Generation Artificial Intelligence Development Plan, released in 2017, vowed to lure top-notch AI scientists in neural network, machine learning, self-driving cars, and intelligent robotics by opening up special channels and offering up competitive compensation packages. Still, it’s not clear that Beijing will be able to reverse the Chinese AI brains from draining to its biggest competitor, the United States.” (MacroPolo, 30 July 2019) Does the USA even want the talents? That is anything but clear in these times.

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Unknown Links between Classic Artworks

Can machine vision detect unknown connections between famous or classic artworks? This seems to be the case, as the work of Tomas Jenicek and Ondřej Chum shows. In their paper “Linking Art through Human Poses” they write: “We address the discovery of composition transfer in artworks based on their visual content. Automated analysis of large art collections, which are growing as a result of art digitization among museums and galleries, is an important tool for art history and assists cultural heritage preservation. Modern image retrieval systems offer good performance on visually similar artworks, but fail in the cases of more abstract composition transfer. The proposed approach links artworks through a pose similarity of human figures depicted in images.” (Abstract) Human figures are the subject of many paintings from the Middle Ages to the Modern Age and their unmistakable poses have often been a source of inspiration among artists. Think of “Sleeping Venus” by Giorgione, “Venus of Urbino” by Titian and “Olympia” by Édouard Manet – paintings with similarities and correlations. The method of the two scientists consists of fast pose matching and robust spatial verification. They “experimentally show that explicit human pose matching is superior to standard content-based image retrieval methods on a manually annotated art composition transfer dataset” (Abstract). The paper can be downloaded via arxiv.org/abs/1907.03537.

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Could Artificial Intelligence Trigger Wars?

Deep fakes are a young phenomenon. Of course there have been fake videos for a long time. But that artificial intelligence makes the production possible, even in standard applications, is new. On August 1, an article dedicated to the phenomenon was published in the German newspaper Die Welt. It begins with the following words: “It is well known that a picture says more than a thousand words. And moving images, i.e. videos, are still regarded as unmistakable proof that something has taken place exactly as it can be seen in the film. … Powerful artificial intelligence (AI) processes now make it possible to produce such perfect counterfeits that it is no longer possible to tell with the naked eye whether a video is real or manipulated. In so-called deep fake videos, people say or do things they would never say or do.” Among others, the philosopher Oliver Bendel is quoted. The article with the title “Artificial intelligence could trigger wars” can be downloaded via www.welt.de.

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About Robophilosophy

Robophilosophy or robot philosophy is a field of philosophy that deals with robots (hardware and software robots) as well as with enhancement options such as artificial intelligence. It is not only about the reality and history of development, but also the history of ideas, starting with the works of Homer and Ovid up to science fiction books and movies. Disciplines such as epistemology, ontology, aesthetics and ethics, including information and machine ethics, are involved. The website robophilosophy.com or robophilosophy.net is operated by Oliver Bendel, a robot philosopher who lives and works in Switzerland. Guest contributions are welcome. They should be exclusively scientific and should not advertise for companies.