'He's in our hearts': Family and friends still seek answers one year after Nathan Wise’s disappearance
It’s been a year since Nathan Wise went missing and his family is no closer to finding out what happened to him.
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."
It’s been a year since Nathan Wise went missing and his family is no closer to finding out what happened to him.
Dozens of Ontarians are expressing frustration in the province’s health-care system after their family doctors either dropped them as patients or threatened to after they sought urgent care elsewhere.
An Ottawa pizzeria is being recognized as one of the top 20 deep-dish pizzas in the world.
Amazon's paid subscription service provides free delivery for online shopping across Canada except for remote locations, the company said in an email. While customers in Iqaluit qualify for the offer, all other communities in Nunavut are excluded.
The fire burning near Fort McMurray grew from 25 hectares to 5,500 hectares over the weekend.
Russia’s President Vladimir Putin began a Cabinet shakeup on Sunday, proposing the replacement of Sergei Shoigu as defence minister as he begins his fifth term in office.
Police are searching for a male suspect after a man was “slashed in neck” on Sunday morning in downtown Toronto and died.
There were some scary moments for several people on a northern Ontario highway caught on video Thursday after a chain reaction following a truck fire.
Health Canada announced various product recalls this week, including electric adapters, armchairs, cannabis edibles and vehicle components.
English, history, entertainment, math and geography: high school trivia teams could be quizzed on any of it when they compete at the Reach for the Top Nationals in Ottawa in June.
An Ottawa pizzeria is being recognized as one of the top 20 deep-dish pizzas in the world.
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.
The threat of zebra mussels has prompted the federal government to temporarily ban watercraft from a Manitoba lake popular with tourists.
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.
Just as she had feared, a restaurant owner from eastern Quebec who visited Montreal had her SUV stolen, but says it was all thanks to the kindness of strangers on the internet — not the police — that she got it back.