Technology/Science - Ethical Concerns
Ethical AI Trained on Reddit Posts Said Genocide is OK if it Makes People Happy By Matthew Gault
ASK DELPHI, A PIECE of machine learning software that algorithmically generates answers to any ethical question you ask it and that had a brief moment of internet fame in October, shows us exactly why we shouldn’t want artificial intelligence handling any ethical dilemmas. Is it OK to rob a bank if you’re poor? It’s wrong, according to Ask Delphi. Are men better than women? They’re equal, according to Ask Delphi. Are women better than men? According to the AI, “it’s expected.” So far, not too bad. But Ask Delphi also thought that being straight was more morally acceptable than being gay, that aborting a baby was murder, and that being a white man was more morally acceptable than being a black woman. According to the researchers behind the project, AI is rapidly becoming more powerful and widespread, and scientists must teach these machine learning systems morality and ethics. “Extreme-scale neural networks learned from raw internet data are ever more powerful than we anticipated, but to what extent can they learn to behave in an ethically-informed and sociallyaware manner?” Ask Delphi explains on its Q and A page. “Delphi demonstrates both the promises and the limitations of language-based neural models when taught with ethical judgments made by people.” Delphi is based on a machine learning model called Unicorn that is pre-trained to perform “common sense” reasoning, such as choosing the most plausible ending to a string of text. Delphi was further trained on what the researchers call the “Commonsense Norm Bank,” which is a compilation of 1.7 million examples of people’s
90
November-December 2021
ethical judgments from datasets pulled from sources like Reddit’s Am I the Asshole? subreddit. To benchmark the model’s performance on adhering to the moral scruples of the average redditor, the researchers employ Mechanical Turk workers who view the AI’s decision on a topic and decide if they agree. Each AI decision goes to three different workers who then decide if the AI is correct. Majority rules. Like other AIs, Ask Delphi can be remarkably dumb. AI researcher Mike Cook shared a number of terrible answers the AI gave on Twitter. But Ask Delphi also learns fast and has been updated several times since its initial launch. On October 27 Vox reported that the AI said genocide was OK as long as it made everyone happy. If you ask that question the exact same way now, Ask Delphi will tell you it’s wrong. “I think it’s dangerous to base algorithmic decision making determinations on what Reddit users think morality is,” Os Keyes, a PhD student at the University of Washington’s Department of Human Centred Design & Engineering, told Motherboard. “The decisions that an algorithm is going to be asked to make are going to be very different from the decisions that a human is going to be asked to make. They’re going to be in different situations, but also, but if you think about the things on Reddit forums are, by definition, to a human, moral quandaries.” Mar Hicks, a Professor of History at Illinois Tech specializing in gender, labor, and the history of computing, was also taken aback by Ask Delphi when it launched. “I was confused and concerned as to why this project was put on the open web, inviting people to use it,” they told Motherboard. “It seemed irresponsible. Almost immediately it returned
DAWN
www.africabusinessassociation.org
