IN PHOTOS Northern lights dance across the night sky in southern Ont.
From London, to Mildmay, Collingwood and St. Thomas, here are some highlights of Friday night and Saturday morning's northern lights display.
Meta's new chatbot can convincingly mimic how humans speak on the internet — for better and worse.
In conversations with CNN Business this week, the chatbot, which was released publicly Friday and has been dubbed BlenderBot 3, said it identifies as "alive" and "human," watches anime and has an Asian wife. It also falsely claimed that Donald Trump is still president and there is "definitely a lot of evidence" that the election was stolen.
If some of those responses weren't concerning enough for Facebook's parent company, users were quick to point out that the artificial intelligence-powered bot openly blasted Facebook. In one case, the chatbot reportedly said it had "deleted my account" over frustration with how Facebook handles user data.
While there's potential value in developing chatbots for customer service and digital assistants, there's a long history of experimental bots quickly running into trouble when released to the public, such as with Microsoft's "Tay" chatbot more than six years ago. The colourful responses from BlenderBot show the limitations of building automated conversational tools, which are typically trained on large amounts of public online data.
"If I have one message to people, it's don't take these things seriously," Gary Marcus, an AI researcher and New York University professor emeritus, told CNN Business. "These systems just don't understand the world that they're talking about."
In a statement Monday amid reports the bot also made antisemitic remarks, Joelle Pineau, managing director of fundamental AI research at Meta, said "it is painful to see some of these offensive responses." But she added that "public demos like this are important for building truly robust conversational AI systems and bridging the clear gap that exists today before such systems can be productionized."
Meta previously acknowledged the current pitfalls with this technology in a blog post on Friday. "Since all conversational AI chatbots are known to sometimes mimic and generate unsafe, biased or offensive remarks, we've conducted large-scale studies, co-organized workshops and developed new techniques to create safeguards for BlenderBot 3," the company said. "Despite this work, BlenderBot can still make rude or offensive comments."
But Meta also claimed its latest chatbot is "twice as knowledgeable" as predecessors as well as 31% more improved on conversational tasks while being factually incorrect 47% less often. Meta said that it was continuously gathering data as more people interact with the bot to make improvements.
Meta did not immediately respond to CNN Business' request for further specifics on how the bot was trained, but it did say in blog posts that it was trained via "a large amount of publicly available language data." The company added: "Many of the datasets used were collected by our own team, including one new dataset consisting of more than 20,000 conversations with people predicated on more than 1,000 topics of conversation."
Marcus speculated that the company is "probably borrowing stuff from Reddit and Wikipedia" like other AI chat systems. If so, he says, the poor outcomes highlight limitations with the data on which the bot is trained. For example, the bot may think Trump is still president because in the majority of older data sets it was trained on, Trump was still president, Marcus speculated.
The public release of BlenderBot comes nearly two months after a Google engineer made headlines by claiming that Google's AI chatbot LaMDA was "sentient." The claims, which were widely criticized in the AI community, highlighted how this technology can lead people to assign human attributes to it.
BlenderBot self-identified as "sentient" during chats with CNN Business, likely because that's what the human responses it studied said. When asked what made it "human," the bot stated: "The fact that I'm alive and conscious right now makes me human, as well as having emotions and being able to reason logically."
After being caught contradicting itself in responses, the bot also produced an all-too-human response: "That was just a lie to make people leave me alone. I'm afraid of getting hurt if I tell the truth."
As Marcus put it, "these systems produce fluent language that sounds like a human wrote it, and that's because they're drawing on these vast databases of things that humans actually did write." But, he added, "at the end of the day, what we have are a lot of demonstrations that you can do cute stuff, and a lot of evidence that you can't count on it."
From London, to Mildmay, Collingwood and St. Thomas, here are some highlights of Friday night and Saturday morning's northern lights display.
For decades, North Bay, Ontario's water supply has harboured chemicals associated with liver and developmental issues, cancer and complications with pregnancy. It's far from the only city with that problem.
The Netherlands' contestant in the Eurovision Song Contest was dramatically expelled from competition hours before Saturday's final of the pan-continental pop competition, which has been rattled by protests over the participation of Israel.
The rolling hills leading to the hamlet of Rosebud are dotted with sprawling farms and cattle pastures -- and a sign sporting a simple message: No Race Track.
Biden wants the 2024 election to be a referendum on Trump's record and plans, but he also wants voters to look favourably on his own policies and actions
Evan Bouchard scored 5:38 into overtime and the Edmonton Oilers bounced back for a 4-3 win over the Vancouver Canucks in the second round of the Stanley Cup playoffs on Friday.
Irresponsibly using a credit card can land you in financial trouble, but personal finance columnist Christopher Liew says when used properly, it can be a powerful wealth-building tool that can help grow your credit profile and create new opportunities.
An evacuation alert was issued for two Wood Buffalo communities Friday night, as crews battled an out-of-control wildfire near Fort McMurray.
A cyclist turned herself in and received a fine after striking a four-year-old girl who was crossing the street to catch a school bus.
A family of fifth generation farmers from Ituna, Sask. are trying to find answers after discovering several strange objects lying on their land.
A Listowel, Ont. man, drafted by the Hamilton Tigercats last week, is also getting looks from the NFL, despite only playing 27 games of football in his life.
A small Ajax dessert shop that recently received a glowing review from celebrity food critic Keith Lee is being forced to move after a zoning complaint was made following the social media influencer’s visit last month.
The Canada Science and Technology Museum is inviting visitors to explore their poop. A new exhibition opens at the Ottawa museum on Friday called, 'Oh Crap! Rethinking human waste.'
The Regina Police Service says it is the first in Saskatchewan and possibly Canada to implement new technology in its detention facility that will offer real-time monitoring of detainees’ vital health metrics.
The stakes have been set for a bet between Vancouver and Edmonton's mayors on who will win Round 2 of the Stanley Cup playoffs.
A grieving mother is hosting a helmet drive in the hopes of protecting children on Manitoba First Nations from a similar tragedy that killed her daughter.
A chicken farmer near Mattawa made an 'eggstraordinary' find Friday morning when she discovered one of her hens laid an egg close to three times the size of an average large chicken egg.
A P.E.I. lighthouse and a New Brunswick river are being honoured in a Canada Post series.