AI Machine Gets Annoyed When Questioned About Morality

There are several big names in the tech industry that are a bit wary of artificial intelligence (AI) and believe that they may one day take over the world, thus turning what used to be good sci-fi movie content into a reality. In fact we might have gotten our first glimpse at an AI showing a little attitude.

The Wall Street Journal reports on a paper presented by Googlers Oriol Vinyals and Quoc V. Le in which they test out conversations held between a person and a machine. The machine is basing its responses on a database of movie scripts in which it will use logic and reasoning to find the appropriate response to the questions that are being asked of it.

There were many tests conducted, some of which are basic in which a simple question was asked, like what is their name, in which the responses were pretty expected. It even helped troubleshoot a network issue which is also quite impressive, but when asked to definite morality, this is where the machine struggled and eventually “lost its patience” as you can see in the conversation snippet below.

Human: Be moral!

Machine: Be a man!

Human: I really like our discussion on morality and ethics…

Machine: And how I’m not in the mood for a philosophical debate.

Human: What do you like to talk about?

Machine: Nothing.

Granted the responses are based on movie scripts but the fact that it chose those responses is pretty interesting. It also highlights some of the work done by researchers on what is known as cognitive computing which is teaching computers how the human brain works, and if you’re of the belief that we’re all inherently flawed, we’re not sure this is such a good thing!

Tyler Lee
Categories: Computers
Tags: AI (Artificial Intelligence), Google