November 2016 Archives

Clopen AI: Openness in different aspects of AI development

[This article is cross-posted from my blog. Thanks to Jelena Luketina and Janos Kramar for their detailed feedback on this post.]

1-clopen-set

There has been a lot of discussion about the appropriate level of openness in AI research in the past year – the OpenAI announcement, the blog post Should AI Be Open?, a response to the latter, and Nick Bostrom’s thorough paper Strategic Implications of Openness in AI development.

There is disagreement on this question within the AI safety community as well as outside it. Many people are justifiably afraid of concentrating power to create AGI and determine its values in the hands of one company or organization. Many others are concerned about the information hazards of open-sourcing AGI and the resulting potential for misuse. In this post, I argue that some sort of compromise between openness and secrecy will be necessary, as both extremes of complete secrecy and complete openness seem really bad. The good news is that there isn’t a single axis of openness vs secrecy – we can make separate judgment calls for different aspects of AGI development, and develop a set of guidelines.

Continue reading “Clopen AI: Openness in different aspects of AI development”

Are Deep Neural Networks Creative? v2

[This article is a revised version reposted with permission from KDnuggets]

Are deep neural networks creative? Given recent press coverage of art-generating deep learning, it might seem like a reasonable question. In February, Wired wrote of a gallery exhibition featuring works generated by neural networks. The works were created using Google’s inceptionism, technique that transforms images by iteratively modifying them to enhance the activation of specific neurons in a deep net. Many of the images appear trippy, with rocks transforming into buildings or leaves into insects. Several other researchers have proposed techniques for generating images from neural networks for their aesthetic or stylistic qualities. One method, introduced by Leon Gatys of the University of Tubingen in Germany, can extract the style from one image (say a painting by Van Gogh), and apply it to the content of another image (say a photograph).

In the academic sphere, work on generative image modeling has emerged as a hot research topic. Generative adversarial networks (GANs), introduced by Ian Goodfellow, synthesize novel images by modeling the distribution of seen images. Already some researchers have looked into ways of using GANS to perturb natural images, as by adding smiles to photos.

In parallel, researchers have also made rapid progress on generative language modeling. Character-level recurrent neural network (RNN) language models now permeate the internet, appearing to hallucinate passages of Shakespeare, Linux source code, and even Donald Trump’s Twitter eruptions. Not surprisingly, a wave of papers and demos soon followed, using LSTMs for generating rap lyrics and poetry.

Clearly, these advances emanate from interesting research and deserve the fascination they inspire.

In this post, rather than address the quality of the work (which is admirable), or explain the methods (which has been done ad nauseam), we’ll instead address the question, can these nets reasonably be called creative? Already, some make the claim. The landing page for deepart.io, a site which commercializes the “Deep Style” work, proclaims “TURN YOUR PHOTOS INTO ART”. If we accept creativity as a prerequisite for art, the claim is made here implicitly.

Continue reading “Are Deep Neural Networks Creative? v2”

The Failure of Simple Narratives

Approximately Correct is not a political blog in any traditional sense. The mission is not to prognosticate elections, like FiveThirtyEight, nor to revel in the political circus, like Politico. And the common variety political writing seems antithetical to our goals. Today, political arguments tend to follow an anti-scientific pattern of choosing a perspective first and then selectively reaching for supporting evidence. It’s everything we should hope to avoid.

But, per our mission statement, this blog aims to address the intersection of scientific and technical developments with social issues. And social issues -the economy, the environment, healthcare, news curation, et al. – are necessarily political. Moreover, scientific practice requires dispassionate discourse and the ability to change one’s beliefs given new information. In this light, the abstention of scientists from political discourse seems irresponsible.

[An aside: Not all political issues are scientific or technical. The relative value of free speech vs the danger of hate speech may be an intrinsically subjective judgment. But many issues, such as global warming, explicitly exhibit scientific dimensions.]

Technical developments can necessitate policy shifts. Absent the capacity to warm the planet or the ability to detect such warming, one couldn’t justify strong reforms to energy policy. Additionally, absent scientific understanding of the likely effects of policy, one cannot argue effectively for or against them. So sober scientific analysis has a role to play not just in evaluating policies, but also in evaluating individual arguments.

Machine learning and data science interact with politics in a third important way. The political landscapes of entire nations are immense. Take last night’s presidential election for example. Roughly 120 million people voted in 3,007 counties, 435 congressional districts and 50 states. Hardly any citizens have visited every state. Not even the candidates could possibly visit every county. Thus, our sense of the nation’s pulse, and our narratives regarding the driving forces in the election are ultimately shaped by a mixture of second-hand accounts and data science (as by extensive polling).

Simplistic Narratives

Simplistic narratives and data science play off of each other. Narratives influence the questions that pollsters ask. And each poll result invites simplistic analysis. In the remainder of this post, without expressing my personal opinions, I’d like to give a dispassionate analysis of several popular stories that have risen to prominence during this election, sampled from across both the Democratic-Republican and establishment/anti-establishment divide. I choose these narratives neither because they are completely true nor completely false. Each presents a seemingly simple thesis that belies more complex realities. To be as even-handed as possible, I’ve chosen one each from the Clinton-learning and Trump-leaning narratives. Continue reading “The Failure of Simple Narratives”

The Foundations of Algorithmic Bias

This morning, millions of people woke up and impulsively checked Facebook. They were greeted immediately by content curated by Facebook’s newsfeed algorithms. To some degree, this news might have influenced their perceptions of the day’s news, the economy’s outlook, and the state of the election. Every year, millions of people apply for jobs. Increasingly, their success might lie in part in the hands of computer programs tasked with matching applications to job openings. And every year, roughly 12 million people are arrested. Throughout the criminal justice system, computer-generated risk-assessments are used to determine which arrestees should be set free. In all these situations, algorithms are tasked with making decisions.

Algorithmic decision-making mediates more and more of our interactions, influencing our social experiences, the news we see, our finances, and our career opportunities. We task computer programs with approving lines of credit, curating news, and filtering job applicants. Courts even deploy computerized algorithms to predict “risk of recidivism”, the probability that an individual relapses into criminal behavior. It seems likely that this trend will only accelerate as breakthroughs in artificial intelligence rapidly broaden the capabilities of software.

futurama-judge

Turning decision-making over to algorithms naturally raises worries about our ability to assess and enforce the neutrality of these new decision makers. How can we be sure that the algorithmically curated news doesn’t have a political party bias or job listings don’t reflect a gender or racial bias? What other biases might our automated processes be exhibiting that that we wouldn’t even know to look for?

Continue reading “The Foundations of Algorithmic Bias”