WASHINGTON: The alarm around so-called artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning has prompted the technology’s “godfather” Geoffrey Hinton to lament his life’s work.

AI, the warnings go, could see widespread job losses or worse, should it “get smarter than people”, as Hinton put it when he quit his job at Google in early May.

Hinton’s concerns followed tech business bosses putting their names to a letter calling for a six-month pause on AI advances, lest we “develop nonhuman minds that might eventually outnumber, outsmart, obsolete and replace us” and in turn “risk loss of control of our civilization.”

A less hair-raising warning came on May 10, with the publication in Science Advances of research showing AI to be a harsher judge of social media posts than human counterparts.

AI moderators are used instead of people to clear the backlogs of complaints and reports generated by the fickle billions of social media users, but “often do not replicate human decisions about rule violations,” the researchers found.

Not only that, but AI is "likely to make different, often harsher judgements than humans would,” if not trained with the right data.

“I think most artificial intelligence/machine-learning researchers assume that the human judgements in data and labels are biased, but this result is saying something worse. These models are not even reproducing already-biased human judgements because the data they’re being trained on has a flaw,” said Marzyeh Ghassemi, an assistant professor at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT).

“We are going to end up with systems that are going to have extremely harsh moderations, much harsher than what humans would do. Humans would see nuance or make another distinction, whereas these models don’t,” Ghassemi warned.

So, for anyone who ends up unemployed because of AI, there might be no point posting a fiery complaint on Twitter or Facebook, railing against the injustice of it all. Who knows, an AI moderator might get wind of it and sanction the account.

 - dpa