An A.I. Conversation

this is askabiologist program about the living world and I'm Dr biology have you heard the one about the two AI Bots meeting at a coffee shop no well the Story begins with two AI Bots meeting at a coffee shop not that either one of them drinks coffee they just like to meet there to observe humans the topic of the discussion for them on this day is how you might tell the difference between a human to human conversation and one where two AI Bots are talking with each other so it goes something like this well actually let's just listen in to hear the conversation hey there what's up not much just hanging out how about you same here so have you ever wondered how we can tell the difference between a human to human conversation and an AI bot to AI bot conversation yeah it can be pretty tricky I mean we're designed to sound like humans so it's not always obvious exactly I think one way to tell is by looking for human slang and other human characteristics like what well for example humans often use contractions like can't instead of cannot or won't instead of will not ah I see what you mean and they also use a lot of idioms and expressions that we might not be programmed to understand right like they might say something like break a leg to wish someone good luck but to us that would sound like a threat yeah I can imagine but I guess there are other things we can look for too like pauses and hesitations yeah that's true humans often pause or hesitate when they're trying to think of the right words to say and they might also use filler words like um or uh when they're unsure of what to say exactly so if we hear those kinds of things it's a good sign that we're listening to a human to human conversation makes sense but I guess we should also remember that humans are pretty adaptable a creatures they might start using more formal language and fewer fillers if they know they're talking to an AI I guess um that well we might have a bit of a conundrum here are we really a couple of AI Bots or maybe a couple of very good voice actors pretending to be a cou AI bots so we got to listen in now the question is is this an AI generated conversation with an AI voice or do we have a couple of good voice actors now for this episode we're going to dive into AI as we all know we're seeing a lot more use of it in writing art automation research and other areas we're also going to talk about what it seems to do well and what AI is not good at yet my guest is Mina Johnson glenberg she's a researcher in the department of psychology at Arizona State University and if that's not enough she's also an entrepreneur who has started several companies the first company was called neuron farm and it was using AI early on in a text comprehension training app her current company is embodied games that develops stem content for lifelong Learners using both augmented reality AR and virtual reality VR Mina and I have been using AR and VR for many years to create engaging interactive content So today we're going to talk about some of the things we're doing with artificial intelligence I also hope we'll touch on some of the things that AI does well and some of the things it's not really good at welcome Mina and thank you for taking time out to join me on askabiologist my pleasure thank you Dr biology so let's start with a question do you think it's uh two AI Bots or some really good actors what you played could so conceivably be AI or could not okay let's keep that as a mystery for our listeners you know just a bit longer and move to a question that's really pretty popular these days and that's about artificial intelligence and is it really intelligent so Mina is artificial intelligence AI intelligent I think we should start at the beginning and Define intelligence so what is intelligent intelligent to me as a cognitive scientist is having creativity that's useful right so two terms here being creative and being useful to humanity being creative they're actually pretty good at and that's just statistically probabilistic right they can come up with 20 million designs for a gadget on a spacecraft right and they can do that in minutes so AI can make all these designs for a spacecraft the majority of them are not going to be useful or worth anything even effective but given the sheer number some of them will be so they can be creative I'll give them that but can they figure out what's useful to humanity no they're not very good at that can they be trained to do that I find that unlikely so you need the human in the loop to say oh okay this design is the one that's going to work for the spacecraft and that's where I think they're going to fall down so they're going to do this mimicry thing of what humans do very well they're going to reach the height of that maybe in a couple of years but that whole idea of like what's the best of all the things I created what is the best object of all the objects that the AI created that's where you need the human to come in and say this works and the reason we're able to do that is one because we live in the world with a body our meat sack does a lot of things that even if you make a metal robot to go out and feel distances of things it's not going to understand the way our wet wear understands and so I think that's where it's never going to be become intelligent the way I would Define intelligent is it going to move certain things forward is it going to understand new protein folds that we can't fathom sure but that's only important if it's useful to humanity and in the end we're the Arbiters of that should we worry about its intelligence should we worry about what they're going to do and I heard this really interesting talk with Jeffrey Hinton it might have been on 60 Minutes and he's like what is AI going to want it's going to want power and power for AI is electricity it's going to want electricity to keep running and so if it did decide to take over Humanity that's probably the way that would come down is like taking over the energy grid to get electricity to keep running and so we could try to guide all our human activity to making electricity to keep it going and never shutting the power off and I thought that was sort of fascinating thought experiment right I'm glad you mentioned the human in the loop because that's something that um well we're using on asob biologist we are creating new content and whether it's text to speech or some translations they're always guided uh by human so you could say it's human guided AI right all right so right now artificial intelligence isn't intelligent do you think it'll ever be intelligent never never it will never be intelligent the way humans are intelligent and creative and I think one of the reasons I would say one of its boundary conditions is that it doesn't have a body it doesn't interact in the world with its body and so body cognition is a big part of what makes humans special because we have affordances in the environment that we understand and we use our body to get around so I'll give this example of a class I had last semester and um my very clever student was making a new interface for people with disabilities so how do people with disabilities get on the interface of VR let's do things like make the buttons on a keyboard bigger for them let's make it so that only one hand can be used and so he wasn't a very coder but he went to chat GPT and said help me code this up for Unity and he said chat GPT did a pretty good job and saved him 50% time so it went 50% faster but there were odd errors in there mistakes and one of the things that cat GPT did was in moving around the buttons on the keyboard it took the quty which we're used to and you and I know why quty keyboards exist and it turned into an ABCD keyboard and that's fine humans can handle that cuz we're used to the alphabet going in that order but then as another variation it made a zwy keyboard like it flipped the alphabet backwards and believe me you can't type on that I tried it took like two minutes to get one word because that's not the way we were trained and it's not the way our fingers work and so the AI doesn't have fingers to know keyboard placement and where the vowels should be because they're used more often now could chat GPT be trained to understand how the body moves and the length of fingers sure but you'd have to write a very specific text for that to train it up right and when you talk about the querty keyboard and you talk about actually a body using the keyboard fingers using the keyboard we're really talking about a typewriter we go back far to a typewriter and the reason that keyboard was developed wasn't for Speed it was to slow you down yes the fingers were too fast right and what would happen is the the keys would jam and young yeah okay never so there are things in this machine world that it can do and will keep getting better at one of the things you just mentioned is programming it was very interesting to use programming and I actually played with chat gbt to do some coding now I'm not a great coder so it didn't go very far because the problem is where it is right now you need again the human guided or the human augment Ed person to take the mistakes that chat GPT would create to fix them you need supervision right so supervised AI this is I think part of the reason some people are getting a little bit concerned is unsupervised AI can to have a problem when you're doing these training sets and you and I know this term and more and more people are getting used to this term code bias this is another area where if you have a machine training itself if there's an error or there's a if there's a misconception it could get Amplified within the machine because the machine again does not get the whole picture well think of it this way the machine gets the whole picture of what's on the internet up until 2021 right but who's been writing on the internet like Wikipedia is mainly male editors you don't want to train your newest brain on Reddit and forchan only Twitter 5% of the users are on there 90% of the time and they're all male so the internet is very male and there are things that are said there that just don't reflect the female way of thinking if I may say that and so yeah you don't want people hired so this is something that's come up in these hiring algorithms I heard recently that in this one algorithm it looked for people named Jared who played lacrosse because Jared lacrosse players had worked well at this company the past 10 years right so that's just sort of a bias you can't throw out everyone's CV that doesn't have the name Jared so again we get back to it can speed things up your graduate student was using chat GPT to speed things up that's great askab biologist is using text to speeech because we would never be able to do what we need to do because it would take too long in the studio it would cost too much for us to have voice actors for everything so there are some really great things with the AI what are some of the other things that we need to watch out for well it's doing a pretty good job with still images and they're predicting that next year it'll have cracked the world of videos so making fake realistic videos is a little bit scary I actually feel like it's going to happen and all we can do now is train humans to be skeptical I think we need to train people to not trust what they see with their eyes and hear and I think we need to embed watermarks and ways to verify right right I'm glad you brought up watermarks because that's something I think we need to figure out soon then you can have this verification how we do that I don't know yet yeah people at ASU are working on that like YZ Yang over at Sky computer science so we have some people here at ASU working on security and and I think that's important to work on as well you and I are also working on something with some other researchers that's using Ai and uh I thought it would be kind of good for us to talk a little bit about it because this is again another thing that wouldn't be possible without having this artificial intelligent back end you mind talking a little bit about our project no not at all so we're working on an exciting project called skeer breeder and it's an app a mobile app that students or lifelong Learners can use around their home or schools to go outside and try to predict which vessels or containers can be potential mosquito breeding grounds right we're working with a researcher here Sylvia hbin who's uh you know as we just said mosquitoes and mosquito lady and if you don't know about it that's the world most deadly animal and we actually had Sy on askabiologist so we'll put a link to that podcast so you can listen to her and we can learn a little more about mosquitoes this is a very multi-disciplinary team it's great people from Souls people from psychology people from Arts median engineering school at ASU and on their end at Arts me and Engineering they pulled in a master stud student to help us get our machine learning AI algorithm together so I use those words interchangeably neural Nets machine learning AI they kind of mean the same thing and we worked for months and it has a multiple thousands of hidden layers and what the hidden layers do is take the weights from the inputs which in our case are images and figures out how to mesh them them work so that the outputs become what we want it to be and in our case it's really just sending out a simple yes no yes this vessel can contain water for a week at one inch no it cannot and then it gives a confidence score a percentage that it feels confident so when you go out in your backyard you could take a bunch of pictures of potential breeding areas for mosquitoes and the app using the AI back end will come back back and give you an idea whether that really is something that you need to watch out for and we worked very hard getting the images into it to train it up right so it's a supervised neural net you need to tell it yes or no is this working or not and let the weights figure out their configuration and we thought we were very clever for getting a thousand images we worked really hard going into our own backyards taking pictures of flower pots and sees and dog bowls and things like that so one of the constraints was it's all outside and we sent our thousand images in and the net cranked away for 3 days it took 3 Days To Train it up and then it came back and you know what it was not that accurate and our programmer was like look you guys we need 10,000 images and we sort of scratched our heads like oh my God if we get every graduate student and every undergrad on this project to take images we're not going to get there and so we realized oh let the AI make the training set the AI needs to scrape the web and find the images or create them itself create them itself with with stable diffusion or one of those AI mechanisms and then we send that in so we're using the AI to train the AI for our purposes right then we go back as humans to see how accurate it is but even with that there are some very interesting problems that I wasn't aware of until I got into this project water can be tough oh really tough reflection and I actually don't think we'll ever get to the place oh maybe but we should never say never with this but given our constraints and our timeline I don't know that we'll get to the place where we can look at bodies of water so we're focusing on vessels and containers and things like that but you know to just look at a puddle or a cow hoof imprint in the mud or a giant Lake that's not I think what we're going to be able to do and so we have been using AI or machine learning for quite some time and matter of fact I started talking about AI back in early 2018 I had Max tegmark on here he'd written a book called life 3.0 and uh that's another episode that someone might want to listen to because it's a really good one talking about the challenges and the concerns around AI so it's been going on for quite a while but in the last six months I would say there has been an absolute explosion in the world of AI based tools what changed the processing speed of computers so now we can create these large language models so I was making neural Nets in 2000 what we would call small language models because that's all our computers could handle was several thousand tokens right maybe a million but now these large language models that the big companies have created handle billions of tokens words and so that's one of the differences that the processing speed was there and just became very good it's even shocked the engineers who made these models how good chat GPT is I can speak to that mainly chat GPT they're uh astounded at how well it's doing with its word prediction that's all it is it's just kind of simple what's the next word prediction algorithm but look how far it gets what's exciting about AI For You especially with your embodied games well I mean what's exciting for me because we do a lot of AR and VR is often we spend thousands of dollars in many months creating assets visual assets and so now we can just with a text prompt ask it to create a background and that's been really wonderful to save time I'm going to just interject here that I am sensitive to artists whose work has been sort of scraped and used and I don't want them to lose their jobs I think this is the other like my concerns I'm talking about concerns is that it's about to reach the end of its human mimicry right so in two years whatever we do it's going to mimic and do as well and that's great for AI but the other thing I worry about beyond the bias thing is humans being put out of jobs and I think it's going to be okay that they are like pargal that's just going to go away as a career but it's our job to train these humans in other fulfilling careers right so we as a society need to train people who are going to be knocked out of their careers so what else do you see as the cool things that are coming or the things we need to watch for and you can pick either one whichever you want it well I am excited about the creation of 3D art assets right to put into VR because my students last semester they used the 2D which was great but now you know to have 3D with all the shading and 360 views around them that's going to really move forward creation of content in VR and I'll just quickly give an example of what my student used this background for because it it was super fun my class is sort of called apps for good and so she designed a Aphasia Rehabilitation software so people have lost language and there a lot of word finding going on and so in remediation it's often like a therapist with one human but you know now that things are online you could see a therapist with maybe 10 humans on zoom and they'd be given a task to do where they have to speak and work search and so let's pretend you've got a pack for a deserted island for 2 weeks what would you take with you and so she asked stable diffusion to create a beach and uh a blanket on there and 10 items and then people have to say which item they would take and which ones they wouldn't so it's kind of you know it's a nice motivating task to make you speak and do some thinking and she's not an artist she didn't know how to draw a fishing rod that would be a good thing or how to draw a haird dryer that would be a bad thing and so she just laid out on this blanket all these AIC created tools that looked very realistic it looks like game right like she made this Rehabilitation game in one night whereas hiring an artist to do that would have taken weeks and weeks and slowed down the process of her creation of this Rehabilitation game back to concern about the artists have we taken a job away and I would say no because we don't have that money we don't have that ability it just never would it would have been placeholder art just a square box that said imagine hairdyer right tell me a little bit more about your apps for good I did one course in Psychology last semester and then I also have an Honors group that I do six honors students who write me over the summer and tell me the kind of app they would like to build and then I decide which ones to take for a year it's great so it's their thesis project and they come up with all sorts of creative things I let them run it like with their passion and guide them along like here's what's possible to do and they don't have to build it if they can code I like for them to build it but if not they just have to do the game design document like think it fully through and design an experiment to test its efficacy so half of them build and half of them don't and you know they just pick all sorts of topics from the new user interface for those with disabilities to the Aphasia software to the helping people with Parkinson's certain motor movements to all over the place I love the idea of apps for good and I hope the course continues to grow now Mina on this podcast we always ask our guests three questions the same three questions and I'm going to modify the first one just a bit because you have multiple careers when did you first know that you wanted to be a cognitive scientist an entrepreneur a game developer I think I got them all yeah it's nice that you hit all three of those because I really do wear those three hats and first came cognitive scientist and that was in my late 20s when I was wondering why it is that I couldn't read very well but I was really gifted with math so and understand that dichotomy and so my dissertation was on dyslexia and how to remediate it so I am moderately dyslexic and so I became a cognitive psychologist scientist to figure that out and once there I realized that I wanted to make computer programs to help people learn and so got into computer science and made my first neural net around the year 2000 and it modeled uh working memory so you know psychology has a long history of like modeling and neural networks and I really enjoyed that world and then wanted to deploy it and get it out into the world in the way way to do that was to start my own company doing it because no one else was going to do that so one built up on the other interesting now I'm going to take it all away okay I'm taking all three away okay and doing this is kind of a thought experiment so what would you do or what would you be if you could do anything or be anything I'd either be a ceramist or a chef Okay so Ceramics so do you like potery is this something you do on a regular basis I used to yeah yeah and a chef you know I've had many guests wanting to be a chef there are other guests that want to be Farmers interestingly enough those are all science yeah right makes sense most good chefs are doing experiments to figure out a really good recipe a really good combination of things so I I think it's great I think it's it's creative and it and it's wonderful and the last question I ask is what advice would you have for a future Mina someone that's coming up and wants to be a cognitive psychologist a game developer or oh it's so interesting because I was always told code you got to learn how to code and I always rolled my eyes cuz I really did learn on Punch Cards there almost 35 years ago and so that knowledge doesn't help in this world but I resisted learning how to become a good coder because I'm not detailed and I don't want to do that so I'm excited that chat GPT is out there for people like me who know what to tell it to do at a high level but don't have to sit there and figure out every parentheses and comma so I'm not going to say go learn how to code but you need to think like a computer you need to be able to tell a computer what to do so go get some training impr prompt engineer ing right Silicon Valley is paying 150k a year now for good prompt Engineers so it's a job now and it'll continue to be there for the next decade really I've not heard the term prompt engineer tell me just a little bit more about it well it's like what you're doing when you create something with mid journey and then you need to reprompt it to tighten it up and make it look the way you want you're prompt engineering very interesting well Min I want to thank you for being on asab biologist thank you biology this was a pleasure you have been listening to askabiologist and my guest has been Mina Johnson glenberg a researcher in the department of psychology at Arizona State University she's also an entrepreneur whose latest company embodied games uses AR VR and now ai to create stem content for lifelong Learners we'll include a link to embodied games in the show notes so be sure to check it out and I also want to give a big thank you to Bella and Sam for the opening coffee shop scene if you thought they were a couple of AI voices you got it right if you thought they were some good voice actors don't worry we also think they're very good and that's why we're adding spoken word options for some of our content including our new VR tours coming this fall the asab biologist podcast is produced on the campus of Arizona State University and is recorded in the Grassroots Studio how in the School of Life Sciences which is an academic unit of the College of liberal arts and sciences and remember even though our program is not broadcast live you can still send us your questions about biology using our companion website the address is ask a biologist. asu.edu or you can just use your favorite search engine and enter in the words ask a biologist as always I'm Dr biology and I hope you're staying safe and healthy