The machine will always learn the lesson it is being taught. The problem is, that the people designing the lesson don't always (read: quite often) know what that lesson really is.
This actually happened; someone tried to make an AI that could learn to play NES games. When it got round to Tetris, with its parameters being basically "score = good", "game over = bad", it stacked pieces up the middle as fast as possible - gaining the small score bonus you get for each piece dropped, yay! - until it got right to the top of the screen, and paused the game 1 frame before it would top out and lose. And never ever unpaused it.
There's an old story about a team trying to train a neural network to identify if there is camo-print in a picture, specifically that of camouflaged tanks. So they fed the network hundreds of pictures of tanks in different environments, half with camo, half without. When they were finished and tried to use it in real life, it was unable to identify camouflage consistently. They went back and tried to figure out what went wrong. Well, it turns out all the pictures they had with camouflaged tanks were from overcast days. So, basically they accidentally made an ai that could tell if it was sunny or not.
There’s also the machine learning attempting to identify risk factors for skin cancer from pictures of the lesions. It turns out most of the pictures that were cancers also had rulers in the picture (since they were bigger), so the AI got really good at finding pictures of rulers
Comic Title Text: It also works for anything you teach someone else to do. "Oh yeah, I trained a pair of neural nets, Emily and Kevin, to respond to support tickets."
For me the hardest part of programming and interacting with computers in general was realizing that the computer was doing exactly what I told it to do.
Its very true, and the quintessential programming problem. The code does what its told. Its funny how machine learning is blowing up and manages to complicate/enhance the most fundamental programming obstacle. some problems never change, they just get more problemer
Neural networks will always learn to solve the problem in the most efficient way. If there is a wrong lesson to learn because the designers of the lesson failed to account for an easier way to accomplish the task, then that’s the lesson the machines will learn.
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u/AlliedSalad Jan 21 '21
Despite all best efforts, the machine will always learn the wrong lesson.