Researchers are accusing Google and CBS News of overestimating the capabilities of artificial intelligence (AI) following an interview between the Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai and “60 Minutes.”
During the recent interview, Pichai claimed that AI programs developed by Google had displayed “emergent properties,” or the ability to learn unexpected skills they were not trained on, puzzling researchers.
For example, Google tech executive James Manyika claimed the company’s AI had learned the language of Bengali without significant implementation of the information beforehand.
“We discovered that with very few amounts of prompting in Bengali,” Manyika said, “it can now translate all of Bengali.”
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Google CEO Sundar Pichai recently admitted people “don’t fully understand” how AI works. (Getty Images)
The segment included a video of the software PaLM, the underlying technology that helps power Google’s AI chatbot Bard, showing a user asking the system questions in Bengali and responding in both Bengali and English.
Posting a portion of the interview to Twitter, “60 Minutes” claimed the AI program spoke in a foreign language “it was never trained to know” and said the “mysterious behavior” had been occurring within the Google systems.
However, as initially noted by Buzzfeed News, several AI researchers questioned the language used throughout the interview and accused the news network and Google of spreading “disinformation.”
Emily Bender, a professor in the Department of Linguistics and the faculty director of the CLMS program at the University of Washington, disagreed with the term “emergent properties” and refuted the idea that the AI taught itself Bengali.
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In this photo illustration, a Google Bard AI logo is displayed on a smartphone with a Chat GPT logo in the background. (Photo Illustration by Avishek Das/SOPA Images/LightRocket via Getty Images)
In a separate blog post, Bender said the interview was “painful to watch” and accused Pichai and “60 Minutes” of “working in concert” to peddle AI “hype.”
“The rhetorical move [Pichai] is making here invites the listener to imagine Bard as something like a person, whose behavior we have to live with or maybe patiently train to be better. IT. IS. NOT,” she wrote.
“More generally, any time an AI booster makes this move (‘we don’t understand humans either’) they’re either trying to evade accountability or trying to sell their system as some mysterious, magical, autonomous being. Reporters should recognize this and PUSH BACK,” Bender added.
She also linked to a thread from AI research scientist Margaret Mitchell, who also refuted the idea the AI taught itself Bengali, noting that a glance at PalM’s datasheet showed the language is .006% of the data the model is trained on.
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Artificial Intelligence words are seen in this illustration taken March 31, 2023. (REUTERS/Dado Ruvic/Illustration)
She later added that current AI models can’t speak well-formed languages without prior access and suggested the Google researchers “literally don’t understand how it works.”
“Maintaining the belief in ‘magic’ properties and amplifying it to millions (thanks for nothin @60Minutes!) serves Google’s PR goals,” Mitchell tweeted. “Unfortunately, it is disinformation.”
Mozilla Senior Fellow in Trustworthy AI Abeba Birhane concurred and claimed the interview was “irresponsible,” adding that CBS correspondent Scott Pelley and Pichai “should have known better than peddle absolute nonsense.”
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Brian Merchant, a tech columnist at the Los Angeles Times, called the interview a “disaster.”
“It’s so embarrassing for 60 minutes to have bought this hook line and sinker without ever having consulted a credible AI scholar or tech journalist,” he tweeted.
Google and CBS did not return Fox News Digital’s request for comment.
