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. 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.” “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. “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. If you ask that question the exact same way now, Ask Delphi will tell you it’s wrong. On October 27 Vox reported that the AI said genocide was OK as long as it made everyone happy. Majority rules.īut Ask Delphi also learns fast and has been updated several times since its initial launch. Each AI decision goes to three different workers who then decide if the AI is correct. 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. 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 ethical judgments from datasets pulled from sources like Reddit’s Am I the Asshole? subreddit. “Delphi demonstrates both the promises and the limitations of language-based neural models when taught with ethical judgments made by people.”ĭelphi 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. “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 socially-aware manner?” Ask Delphi explains on its Q and A page.
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.