AI News Roundup — January 2020
by Gabriella Runnels and Macon McLean
The Opex AI Roundup provides you with our take on the coolest and most interesting Artificial Intelligence (AI) news and developments each month. Stay tuned and feel free to comment with any stories you think we missed!
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AI, AI, Burning Bright
Poetry has always been one of the most quintessentially human art forms. Its charms are almost entirely dependent on the specifics of a language, and it often appeals to our senses in inarticulable ways. Naturally, machine learning scientists have begun to try to automate it.
This New Yorker piece dives into the relationship between computer science and poetry, touching on a bot called the Pentametron, machine translation in general, Turing tests, and the question of how to consider machine-generated art. Computer bards haven’t fooled any humans yet, but they might be well on their way.
Putting the “AI” in “Regulations” (…Sorta)
Whether they fear a Skynet-type takeover or robot-aided human misbehavior, many people want to regulate AI. But regulating “AI” is like trying to regulate “electricity” — it’s so broad-strokes as to be a nearly meaningless statement, or so argues R. David Edelman. He believes we need to get specific about the risks posed by AI, to put our thinking caps on and write down all the ways that AI could hurt us. As opposed to coming up with overly wide-ranging principles for AI governance, which could just lull us into a false sense of accomplishment after they’re written, the act of attempting to enumerate AI risks and risk areas will help us get serious and precise about preventing harm from AI.
You’ve Got a Friend in AI
Even here on Earth, hanging out with the same people for months on end can drive you crazy. But unlike here on Earth, when dealing with the psychological stresses of a long space mission, an astronaut has precious little recourse.
That’s why the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory has recently partnered with an Australian tech company to develop an emotionally intelligent AI that could help astronauts deal with the unique challenges of a space mission. Data scientists at JPL (including some former colleagues of mine!) have begun testing early versions of the AI on the Open Source Rover, a very cool project that you should check out here.
Cheater’s Pet
Kaggle’s data science competitions, which sometimes award winning teams with upwards of $1 million, can get pretty dang competitive. A recent competition created by pet adoption website PetFinder.my had a relatively small grand prize at $25,000, but with 2,000 teams in the running, the competition was still intense. The winning squad was led by Kaggle Grandmaster Pavel Pleskov, a high-ranking competitor known throughout the community for his Kaggle prowess. But when a volunteer offered to put the winning code into production, he found hidden pieces of code — code that had helped the winning team cheat.
AInventions
“If I write a Word document with Microsoft Word, that doesn’t make Microsoft Word an author,” says patent attorney Ryan Abbott. Nevertheless, Abbott finds himself working with the Artificial Inventor Project (AIP) to argue that certain types of software programs actually should be given credit for their creations. The AIP posits that “Dabus” should be considered the inventor of two new technologies, but the patent offices have yet to concede that a non-human entity can be an inventor (a 2018 lawsuit known as the “monkey-selfie” case has already determined that animals are ineligible for inventor status on patents). As AI becomes more advanced, we’ll need to thoughtfully address legal conundrums like this one to continue defining the boundaries between artificial and human intelligence.
That’s it for this month! In case you missed it, here’s last month’s roundup with even more cool AI news. Check back in February for more of the most interesting developments in the AI community (from our point of view, of course).
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