Facebook develops artificial intelligence that can lie

Recent warnings from scientists about the risk of robots with artificial intelligence (AI) rising and dominating humanity may no longer be far-fetched after Facebook introduced a new AI system that can lie to get what it wants.

A Facebook AI lab invention shows that negotiation is no longer the exclusive domain of humans. The company’s new AI system has demonstrated that it can learn how to negotiate by observing all the participants in 5,808 human conversations, enabling bots to schedule meetings or bring you the most favorable deals or online transactions.

Facebook researchers used a game to help their bots learn to negotiate books, hats, and basketballs. Each item had a point value, and the bots had to negotiate over messages to divide them.

During the game, whenever it sees a valuable item, the Facebook bot will start making a statement outlining its demands. For example, the bot might say, “I like all books,” because books have a higher point value than hats or basketballs. Based on what it has observed of how humans negotiate with each other, the bot’s AI system will come up with a set of words in a certain order that will help it win what it wants.

Not only does the Facebook bot express its wishes first, it can also respond to the opponent’s messages, and so on until the conversation ends. The team has set the AI ​​system to never accept “empty-handed” in transactions. That means the bot will have to keep negotiating until it achieves its goal, even if it uses deception.

Notably, during the course of the conversation, instead of stating what it wanted outright, the AI ​​system would sometimes feign interest in a worthless object, then give it up in exchange for what the bot really wanted. Facebook researchers are not yet sure whether the AI ​​system learned this trick from human negotiators or whether it acquired the ability by accident. Either way, whenever the trick worked, it was rewarded.

It’s no surprise that Facebook is working on ways to improve how its bots interact with others. The company has invested heavily in developing bots that can negotiate on behalf of users and businesses for its Messenger platform, the future of customer service. This ambition, announced at Facebook’s 2016 F8 developer conference, has so far been unfulfilled due to bots’ inability to create meaningful messages or understand many of the questions users ask.

To advance research, Facebook is now making all code and data obtained from the project public.

According to VNN