Playing Hide And Seek With AI And Privacy

An AI Learns To Play Hide And Seek, Humans Learn to Seek Bots, And Google Is Recording Us Again

OpenAI released their new project on September 17th. It’s an AI that played over 500 million games of hide and seek. It learned to develop complex strategies and use tools. It even found flaws in the environment the programs created.

The researchers built an environment with various objects inside a limited virtual space. The characters were incentivized to hide or seek, and to explore. The video below explains.

Humans are doing some cool things with AI, but we are still not always able to spot even rudimentary bots online. Tools like Botometer help with labeling Twitter users as a human or bot, but people are still bad at that task. A task made harder becasue many people, look like bots, or want to be anonymous.

Some fake accounts are run by real people to prop up numbers of shares, or follows. They can be more malicious and be used for stock pump and dumps, or just phishing schemes. Other times people just want a little privacy.

Privacy is something Google claims they have as a focus. So they changed Google Assistant, voice recording review. So that they will still be reviewed by humans, but now users will have to optin. From the linked post:

The company says they will now only store the audio of consumers who opt in to a “Voice & Audio Activity” option when setting up Google Assistant. Google says they are also being more transparent about the collection. In the past the setting didn’t make it clear recordings would be accessible by humans. Google is updating their user interface, and is asking existing users to reconfirm that they agree to human audio reviews.

AI may save your life one day. But it could also be the death of us all. I’m not an expert, but we should consider improving our ability to be more human before we start down the road of creating a new creature, with a mind we don’t understand, who could have access to everything any of us say in the presents of our phones.

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