The Danger of AI is Weirder Than You Think: Janelle Shane (Transcript)

Here is the full text of AI researcher Janelle Shane’s talk titled “The Danger of AI is Weirder Than You Think” at TED conference.

Janelle Shane – TED Talk TRANSCRIPT

So, artificial intelligence is known for disrupting all kinds of industries.

What about ice cream? What kind of mind-blowing new flavors could we generate with the power of an advanced artificial intelligence?

So I teamed up with a group of coders from Kealing Middle School to find out the answer to this question. They collected over 1,600 existing ice cream flavors, and together, we fed them to an algorithm to see what it would generate. And here are some of the flavors that the AI came up with.

[Pumpkin Trash Break]

[Peanut Butter Slime]

[Strawberry Cream Disease]

These flavors are not delicious, as we might have hoped they would be.

So the question is: What happened? What went wrong? Is the AI trying to kill us? Or is it trying to do what we asked, and there was a problem?

In movies, when something goes wrong with AI, it’s usually because the AI has decided that it doesn’t want to obey the humans anymore, and it’s got its own goals, thank you very much.

In real life, though, the AI that we actually have is not nearly smart enough for that. It has the approximate computing power of an earthworm, or maybe at most a single honeybee, and actually, probably maybe less. Like, we’re constantly learning new things about brains that make it clear how much our AIs don’t measure up to real brains.