It’s all about artificial intelligence as the spring series continues with one of the leaders in the field, Scientia Professor Toby Walsh, chief scientist at the UNSW AI Institute.
We talk about the potential for AI to become an existential threat to humanity, where you would or wouldn’t want a human-shaped robot, whether AI constructs should be labelled as such, the ethics of feeding copies of books into large language models, creativity and copyright law, how to draw a platypus, and why you need a safe word to prove you’re really you.
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Toby Walsh was last on the podcast in September 2022 in The 9pm Killer Robot Restaurant Booking with UNSW Scientia Professor Toby Walsh.
Episode Links
Before I list all of the other links, here are the two sets of AI-generated images I showed Toby Walsh. Click on them for the high-resolution versions.
This first set was generated by a simple prompt, “A platypus”. Clearly it is struggling.
This second set has the more elaborate prompt: “A platypus sitting on a secluded river bank near Sydney”.
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Toby Walsh FAA FACM FAAAS FAAAI FEurAI is a Laureate fellow, and professor of artificial intelligence in the UNSW School of Computer Science and Engineering at the University of New South Wales and Data61 (formerly NICTA). He has served as Scientific Director of NICTA, Australia's centre of excellence for ICT research. He is noted for his work in artificial intelligence, especially in the areas of social choice, constraint programming and propositional satisfiability. He has served on the Executive Council on the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence.
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"Machines Behaving Badly" out now! Laureate Fellow & Scientia Professor of AI @ UNSW Sydney.
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The flagship UNSW Research Institute in artificial intelligence, data science and machine learning.
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Artificial intelligence (AI) is intelligence demonstrated by machines, as opposed to the natural intelligence displayed by animals and humans. AI research has been defined as the field of study of intelligent agents, which refers to any system that perceives its environment and takes actions that maximize its chance of achieving its goals.
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Can AI systems ever be creative? Can they be moral? What can we do to ensure they are not harmful? In this fun and fascinating book, Professor Toby Walsh explores all the ways AI fakes it, and what this means for humanity – now and in the future.
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ChatGPT, which stands for Chat Generative Pre-trained Transformer, is a large language model-based chatbot developed by OpenAI and launched on November 30, 2022, which enables users to refine and steer a conversation towards a desired length, format, style, level of detail, and language.
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[8 June 2022] AI researcher and YouTuber Yannic Kilcher trained an AI using 3.3 million threads from 4chan’s infamously toxic Politically Incorrect /pol/ board. He then unleashed the bot back onto 4chan with predictable results—the AI was just as vile as the posts it was trained on, spouting racial slurs and engaging with antisemitic threads.
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[24 March 2016] Pretty soon after Tay launched, people starting tweeting the bot with all sorts of misogynistic, racist, and Donald Trumpist remarks. And Tay — being essentially a robot parrot with an internet connection — started repeating these sentiments back to users, proving correct that old programming adage: flaming garbage pile in, flaming garbage pile out.
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[29 September 2023] Analysis of a dataset of pirated ebooks, known as Books3, has revealed works by some of the world's most successful authors, including John Grisham, Colleen Hoover and Stephen King, have been used to train generative AI.
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17 May 2023] It started with the theft of a large chunk of human knowledge. Large language models such as ChatGPT have ingested much of the internet, all of Wikipedia and all of the US patent database. Soon it will be much of our scientific knowledge.
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[16 August 2023] "What country in Africa starts with a K," the search term reads. “While there are 54 recognized countries in Africa, none of them begin with the letter "K",” reads the top Google search result. “The closest is Kenya, which starts with a "K" sound, but is actually spelled with a "K" sound.”
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[27 September 2023] Incorrect AI-generated answers are forming a feedback loop of misinformation online.
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[13 December 2021] The technology, which is described today in Nature Food, could help growers work out the best time to use fertilizer on their crops and how much is needed, taking into account factors such as the weather and the condition of the soil. This would reduce the expensive and environmentally damaging effects of overfertilizing soil, which releases the greenhouse gas nitrous oxide and can pollute soil and waterways.
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The Turing test, originally called the imitation game by Alan Turing in 1950, is a test of a machine's ability to exhibit intelligent behaviour equivalent to, or indistinguishable from, that of a human.
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[4 January 2018] Researchers from Google designed a patch—which can be either a physical or digital image—that can trick machine learning into thinking an item is something else. In this case, the patch confounded machine learning into recognizing a banana as a toaster.
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[4 January 2018] These pictures and patterns are known as “adversarial images,” and they exploit weaknesses in the way computers look at the world to make them see stuff that isn’t there. Think of them as optical illusions, but for AI.
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[28 March 2023] "I thought the pope's puffer jacket was real and didn't give it a second thought," tweeted model and author Chrissy Teigen. "No way am I surviving the future of technology."
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[19 March 2023] Have you seen photos of former president Donald Trump getting arrested by police? They’re fake. Or, at least they were at the time of this writing on Sunday afternoon.
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[26 March 2023] One piece of slang that has long embodied the short attention span Internet age is TL;DR, short for “too long; didn’t read.” With the explosion of generative AI tools, we’re rapidly entering the age of TL;DW: “too long, didn’t write.”
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[12 October 2023] ChatGPT-style chatbots that pretend to be people are being used to help companies develop new product and marketing ideas.
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[10 January 2023] Text-to-speech model can preserve speaker's emotional tone and acoustic environment.
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[14 October 2021] AI voice cloning is used in a huge heist being investigated by Dubai investigators, amidst warnings about cybercriminal use of the new technology.
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[13 October 2023] Hello. Today I am going to be interviewing one of the world leaders in artificial intelligence. What would be some good questions to ask him to trigger some interesting conversation, or perhaps even controversy?
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[9 October 2023] In the style of a ChatGPT transcript: Human: Hey ChatGPT, what are your timelines for AGI? ChatGPT: 10 Human: 10 what? ChatGTP: 9
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[10 July 2023] Which contemporary warships have a displacement of around 4400 tons? Please list five classes of ships, with their average displacement.
If all the links aren’t showing up, try here.
Thank you, Media Freedom Citizenry
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This episode it’s thanks to Jamie Morrison for his contribution.
Series Credits
- The 9pm Edict theme by mansardian via The Freesound Project.
- Edict fanfare by neonaeon, via The Freesound Project.
- Elephant Stamp theme by Joshua Mehlman.