Hello. This is 6 Minute English from BBC Learning
English. I’m Neil.
And I’m Sam.
Do you like cooking, Sam? There’s a new
recipe I’ve been trying out - it’s for
‘frosted oysters’.
Frosted oysters?! Sounds… unusual. How
do you make it?
Well, take a pound of chicken, then some cubed
pork and half a crushed garlic.
Eh? I thought you said it was for ‘frosted
oysters’, whatever they are.
Yes, that’s right. Now heat it up until
boiling and serve with custard.
Ugh, that sounds disgusting! Who on earth
told you that recipe?
It’s not ‘who’ told me, Sam, but ‘what’.
In fact, that recipe was made by computers
using artificial intelligence, or AI, which
is the topic of today’s programme. In real
life, AI is making huge progress - from car
satnavs to detecting cancer cells. But as
you can see from that revolting recipe, things
don’t always go according to plan.
So, just how intelligent is artificial intelligence?
I mean, it definitely needs some cooking lessons!
Right. AI is not as intelligent as we tend
to think. AI programmes use artificial brain
cells to roughly imitate real brain cell activity,
but they’re still a long way behind human
levels of intelligence. And that’s my quiz
question – in terms of brain cell count,
what level of intelligence is AI currently
working at? Is AI as smart as:
a) a frog, b) an earthworm or
c) a bumblebee
Well, I don’t think any of those are good
cooks either, to be honest. I’ll say c)
a bumblebee, because at least they can
make honey!
Nice guess, Sam. We’ll find out the answer
later. But first let’s find out more about
how AI misunderstandings like the oyster recipe
can happen. Janelle Shane is the author of
‘You Look Like a Thing and I Love You’
in which she tells her amusing
experiences and bizarre experiments with AI.
You Look Like a Thing and I Love You – that’s
a strange title for a book, Neil.
Yes. It’s another example of AI
miscommunication.
The book title is what a AI produced when
asked to write chat-up lines – remarks men
and women make to start up a conversation
with someone they don’t know but find attractive.
Here she is talking to the BBC World Service
programme More or Less:
So ‘Machine learning’ is what most programmers
mean when they say ‘AI’. In the programme
that we’re used to, if you want to have
a computer programme solve a problem you have
to have a human programmer write down exhaustive
step-by-step instructions on how to do everything.
But with ‘machine learning’ you just give
it the goal, and then the programme figures
out via trial and error how it’s going to
solve that problem.
So even though we’re talking about machines
learning for themselves, there still need
to be humans involved at the start of the
journey. This human teaching is done by computer
programmers – people who write, or code,
the computer programmes used by AI.
Right. These programmers write algorithms
– a set of rules or procedures to be followed
in problem-solving exercises. So, for example,
the AI that wrote that oyster recipe read
thousands of other recipes before coming up
with its own version.
In other words, artificial intelligence uses
a process of trial and error – repeating
the same task over and over until finding
the most successful way. Only in the case
of the oyster recipe, there was more ‘error’
than ‘trial’!
Well, according to Janelle Shane, we can learn
a lot about something by seeing how it
goes wrong. Here she is, talking about an
AI which had been told to solve maths problems:
It seemed to be that it was getting scored
on how many wrong answers it got, and it was
supposed to be minimising the number of wrong
answers, and just by a stroke of luck as part
of its trial and error flailing around, one
of the flails it did accidentally deleted
the solutions list, and then it and everybody
else got a perfect score.
So, AIs learn by minimising their errors – reducing
them as much as possible. And sometimes,
these algorithms only discover the right answer
by a stroke of luck – when something unexpected
happens by good luck or chance. It seems to
me that they’re not so intelligent
after all!
Well, let’s settle it once and for all by
answering today’s quiz question.
Remember I asked you how intelligent AI was
in terms of brain cell count and you said,
as intelligent as...
I said c) a bumblebee.
Well, here’s Janelle again with the answer…
If you’re looking at rough computing power,
the algorithms we’re working with are probably
somewhere around the level of an earthworm.
So, the correct answer was b) as clever as
an earthworm! No wonder AIs can’t cook!
Or take a maths test without cheating! In
this programme we’ve been looking at artificial
intelligence, or AI, and seeing how programmers
– that’s people who write instructions
for computers to follow create algorithms
– sets of rules used in problem-solving.
AI learns through trial and error – repeating
the same activity again and again until discovering
the best way, and minimising – reducing
as much as possible, the number of errors
it makes.
And success can be the result of a stroke
of luck, when something unexpected happens
purely by chance, although so far that hasn’t
helped AIs to write good chat-up lines – the
flattering remarks people make to get to know
someone they find attractive.
And AIs don’t know much about cooking oysters
either!
That’s all from us from this programme.
Be sure to join us again for more topical
discussion and vocabulary at 6 Minute English
for BBC Learning English. Bye for now!
Bye.