When it comes to games such as chess or Go, artificial intelligence (AI) programs have far surpassed the best players in the world. These "superhuman" AIs are unmatched competitors, but perhaps harder than competing against humans is collaborating with them. Can the same technology get along with people?
In a new study, MIT Lincoln Laboratory researchers sought to find out how well humans could play the cooperative card game Hanabi with an advanced AI model trained to excel at playing with teammates it has never met before. In single-blind experiments, participants played two series of the game: one with the AI agent as their teammate, and the other with a rule-based agent, a bot manually programmed to play in a predefined way.
The results surprised the researchers. Not only were the scores no better with the AI teammate than with the rule-based agent, but humans consistently hated playing with their AI teammate. They found it to be unpredictable, unreliable, and untrustworthy, and felt negatively even when the team scored well. A paper detailing this study has been accepted to the 2021 Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems (NeurIPS).
"It really highlights the nuanced distinction between creating AI that performs objectively well and creating AI that is subjectively trusted or preferred," says Ross Allen, co-author of the paper and a researcher in the Artificial Intelligence Technology Group. "It may seem those things are so close that there's not really daylight between them, but this study showed that those are actually two separate problems. We need to work on disentangling those."
Humans hating their AI teammates could be of concern for researchers designing this technology to one day work with humans on real challenges like defending from missiles or performing complex surgery. This dynamic, called teaming intelligence, is a next frontier in AI research, and it uses a particular kind of AI called reinforcement learning.
A reinforcement learning AI is not told which actions to take, but instead discovers which actions yield the most numerical "reward" by trying out scenarios again and again. It is this technology that has yielded the superhuman chess and Go players. Unlike rule-based algorithms, these AI arent programmed to follow "if/then" statements, because the possible outcomes of the human tasks they're slated to tackle, like driving a car, are far too many to code.
"Reinforcement learning is a much more general-purpose way of developing AI. If you can train it to learn how to play the game of chess, that agent won't necessarily go drive a car. But you can use the same algorithms to train a different agent to drive a car, given the right data Allen says. "The sky's the limit in what it could, in theory, do."
Bad hints, bad plays
Today, researchers are using Hanabi to test the performance of reinforcement learning models developed for collaboration, in much the same way that chess has served as a benchmark for testing competitive AI for decades.
The game of Hanabi is akin to a multiplayer form of Solitaire. Players work together to stack cards of the same suit in order. However, players may not view their own cards, only the cards that their teammates hold. Each player is strictly limited in what they can communicate to their teammates to get them to pick the best card from their own hand to stack next.
The Lincoln Laboratory researchers did not develop either the AI or rule-based agents used in this experiment. Both agents represent the best in their fields for Hanabi performance. In fact, when the AI model was previously paired with an AI teammate it had never played with before, the team achieved the highest-ever score for Hanabi play between two unknown AI agents.
"That was an important result," Allen says. "We thought, if these AI that have never met before can come together and play really well, then we should be able to bring humans that also know how to play very well together with the AI, and they'll also do very well. That's why we thought the AI team would objectively play better, and also why we thought that humans would prefer it, because generally we'll like something better if we do well."
Neither of those expectations came true. Objectively, there was no statistical difference in the scores between the AI and the rule-based agent. Subjectively, all 29 participants reported in surveys a clear preference toward the rule-based teammate. The participants were not informed which agent they were playing with for which games.
"One participant said that they were so stressed out at the bad play from the AI agent that they actually got a headache," says Jaime Pena, a researcher in the AI Technology and Systems Group and an author on the paper. "Another said that they thought the rule-based agent was dumb but workable, whereas the AI agent showed that it understood the rules, but that its moves were not cohesive with what a team looks like. To them, it was giving bad hints, making bad plays."
Inhuman creativity
This perception of AI making "bad plays" links to surprising behavior researchers have observed previously in reinforcement learning work. For example, in 2016, when DeepMind's AlphaGo first defeated one of the worlds best Go players, one of the most widely praised moves made by AlphaGo was move 37 in game 2, a move so unusual that human commentators thought it was a mistake. Later analysis revealed that the move was actually extremely well-calculated, and was described as genius.
Such moves might be praised when an AI opponent performs them, but they're less likely to be celebrated in a team setting. The Lincoln Laboratory researchers found that strange or seemingly illogical moves were the worst offenders in breaking humans' trust in their AI teammate in these closely coupled teams. Such moves not only diminished players' perception of how well they and their AI teammate worked together, but also how much they wanted to work with the AI at all, especially when any potential payoff wasnt immediately obvious.
"There was a lot of commentary about giving up, comments like 'I hate working with this thing,'" adds Hosea Siu, also an author of the paper and a researcher in the Control and Autonomous Systems Engineering Group.
Participants who rated themselves as Hanabi experts, which the majority of players in this study did, more often gave up on the AI player. Siu finds this concerning for AI developers, because key users of this technology will likely be domain experts.
"Let's say you train up a super-smart AI guidance assistant for a missile defense scenario. You aren't handing it off to a trainee; you're handing it off to your experts on your ships who have been doing this for 25 years. So, if there is a strong expert bias against it in gaming scenarios, it's likely going to show up in real-world ops," he adds.
Squishy humans
The researchers note that the AI used in this study wasn't developed for human preference. But, that's part of the problem not many are. Like most collaborative AI models, this model was designed to score as high as possible, and its success has been benchmarked by its objective performance.
If researchers dont focus on the question of subjective human preference, "then we won't create AI that humans actually want to use," Allen says. "It's easier to work on AI that improves a very clean number. It's much harder to work on AI that works in this mushier world of human preferences."
Solving this harder problem is the goal of the MeRLin (Mission-Ready Reinforcement Learning) project, which this experiment was funded under in Lincoln Laboratory's Technology Office, in collaboration with the U.S. Air Force Artificial Intelligence Accelerator and the MIT Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science. The project is studying what has prevented collaborative AI technology from leaping out of the game space and into messier reality.
The researchers think that the ability for the AI to explain its actions will engender trust. This will be the focus of their work for the next year.
"You can imagine we rerun the experiment, but after the fact and this is much easier said than done the human could ask, 'Why did you do that move, I didn't understand it?" If the AI could provide some insight into what they thought was going to happen based on their actions, then our hypothesis is that humans would say, 'Oh, weird way of thinking about it, but I get it now,' and they'd trust it. Our results would totally change, even though we didn't change the underlying decision-making of the AI," Allen says.
Like a huddle after a game, this kind of exchange is often what helps humans build camaraderie and cooperation as a team.
"Maybe it's also a staffing bias. Most AI teams dont have people who want to work on these squishy humans and their soft problems," Siu adds, laughing. "It's people who want to do math and optimization. And that's the basis, but that's not enough."
Mastering a game such as Hanabi between AI and humans could open up a universe of possibilities for teaming intelligence in the future. But until researchers can close the gap between how well an AI performs and how much a human likes it, the technology may well remain at machine versus human.
See the article here:
Artificial intelligence is smart, but does it play well with others? - MIT News
- Chinese national arrested and charged with stealing AI trade secrets from Google - NPR - March 8th, 2024 [March 8th, 2024]
- President Biden Calls for Ban on AI Voice Impersonations During State of the Union - Variety - March 8th, 2024 [March 8th, 2024]
- Revolutionize Your Business with AWS Generative AI Competency Partners | Amazon Web Services - AWS Blog - March 8th, 2024 [March 8th, 2024]
- Broadcom Expects AI Demand to Help Offset Weakness Elsewhere - Yahoo Finance - March 8th, 2024 [March 8th, 2024]
- Micron Hits Record High With Analysts Calling It an 'Under-Appreciated AI Beneficiary' - Investopedia - March 8th, 2024 [March 8th, 2024]
- The Adams administration quietly hired its first AI czar. Who is he? - City & State New York - March 8th, 2024 [March 8th, 2024]
- AI likely to increase energy use and accelerate climate misinformation report - The Guardian - March 8th, 2024 [March 8th, 2024]
- This Artificial Intelligence (AI) Stock Could Double, and It Is Way Cheaper Than Nvidia - Yahoo Finance - March 8th, 2024 [March 8th, 2024]
- Fake images made to show Trump with Black supporters highlight concerns around AI and elections - The Associated Press - March 8th, 2024 [March 8th, 2024]
- Artificial intelligence and illusions of understanding in scientific research - Nature.com - March 8th, 2024 [March 8th, 2024]
- Analysis | House AI task force leaders take long view on regulating the tools - The Washington Post - March 8th, 2024 [March 8th, 2024]
- Don't Give Your Business Data to AI Companies - Dark Reading - March 8th, 2024 [March 8th, 2024]
- NIST, the lab at the center of Bidens AI safety push, is decaying - The Washington Post - March 8th, 2024 [March 8th, 2024]
- Essay | AI is Coming! Tips for Staying Calm and Carrying On - The Wall Street Journal - March 8th, 2024 [March 8th, 2024]
- AI can be easily used to make fake election photos - report - BBC.com - March 8th, 2024 [March 8th, 2024]
- 5 Artificial Intelligence (AI) Stocks That Could Make You a Millionaire - Yahoo Finance - March 8th, 2024 [March 8th, 2024]
- AI could be an extraordinary force for good. So why do our politicians still not have a plan? - The Guardian - March 8th, 2024 [March 8th, 2024]
- Mapping Disease Trajectories from Birth to Death with AI - Neuroscience News - March 8th, 2024 [March 8th, 2024]
- India plans 10,000-GPU sovereign AI supercomputer - The Register - March 8th, 2024 [March 8th, 2024]
- SAP enhances Datasphere and SAC for AI-driven transformation - CIO - March 8th, 2024 [March 8th, 2024]
- Jim Cramer names companies and sectors poised to rally on the AI wave - CNBC - March 8th, 2024 [March 8th, 2024]
- The job applicants shut out by AI: The interviewer sounded like Siri - The Guardian - March 8th, 2024 [March 8th, 2024]
- Microsoft confirms Surface and Windows AI event for March 21st - The Verge - March 8th, 2024 [March 8th, 2024]
- Adobes new Express app brings Firefly AI tools to iOS and Android - The Verge - March 8th, 2024 [March 8th, 2024]
- A Google AI Watched 30,000 Hours of Video GamesNow It Makes Its Own - Singularity Hub - March 8th, 2024 [March 8th, 2024]
- Palantir CEO Karp on TITAN, AI Warfare Technology - Bloomberg - March 8th, 2024 [March 8th, 2024]
- Elliptic Curve Murmurations Found With AI Take Flight - Quanta Magazine - March 8th, 2024 [March 8th, 2024]
- 5 AI Stocks to Buy in March 2024, According to Analysts - TipRanks.com - TipRanks - March 8th, 2024 [March 8th, 2024]
- Wix's new AI chatbot builds websites in seconds based on prompts - The Verge - March 8th, 2024 [March 8th, 2024]
- Amid record high energy demand, America is running out of electricity - The Washington Post - March 8th, 2024 [March 8th, 2024]
- AI Crypto Tokens in 5 Minutes: What to Know and Where to Start - Inc. - February 26th, 2024 [February 26th, 2024]
- 'The Worlds I See' by AI visionary Fei-Fei Li '99 selected as Princeton Pre-read - Princeton University - February 26th, 2024 [February 26th, 2024]
- AI is having a 1995 moment, analyst says - Business Insider - February 26th, 2024 [February 26th, 2024]
- Vatican research group's book outlines AI's 'brave new world' - National Catholic Reporter - February 26th, 2024 [February 26th, 2024]
- Honor's Magic 6 Pro launches internationally with AI-powered eye tracking on the way - The Verge - February 26th, 2024 [February 26th, 2024]
- Google explains Gemini's embarrassing AI pictures of diverse Nazis - The Verge - February 26th, 2024 [February 26th, 2024]
- Google cut a deal with Reddit for AI training data - The Verge - February 26th, 2024 [February 26th, 2024]
- What's the point of Elon Musk's AI company? - The Verge - February 26th, 2024 [February 26th, 2024]
- AI agents like Rabbit aim to book your vacation and order your Uber - NPR - February 26th, 2024 [February 26th, 2024]
- Announcing Microsofts open automation framework to red team generative AI Systems - Microsoft - February 26th, 2024 [February 26th, 2024]
- After Nvidia's latest blowout, here are 20 AI stocks expected to rise as much as 44% - Yahoo Finance - February 26th, 2024 [February 26th, 2024]
- 1 Exceptional AI Chip Stock Investors Need to Know About in 2024 - The Motley Fool - February 26th, 2024 [February 26th, 2024]
- Nvidia briefly hits $2 trillion valuation as AI frenzy grips Wall Street - Reuters - February 26th, 2024 [February 26th, 2024]
- AI Chatbots Can Guess Your Personal Information From What You ... - WIRED - October 18th, 2023 [October 18th, 2023]
- Harvard IT Launches Pilot of AI Sandbox to Enable Walled-Off Use ... - Harvard Crimson - October 18th, 2023 [October 18th, 2023]
- Advancing policing through AI: Insights from the global law ... - Police News - October 18th, 2023 [October 18th, 2023]
- Hochul announces new SUNY, IBM investments in AI - Olean Times Herald - October 18th, 2023 [October 18th, 2023]
- Nvidia's banking on TensorRT to expand its generative AI dominance - The Verge - October 18th, 2023 [October 18th, 2023]
- AI expands from MRFs to vehicles - Plastics Recycling Update - October 18th, 2023 [October 18th, 2023]
- AI Reads Ancient Scroll Charred by Mount Vesuvius in Tech First - Scientific American - October 18th, 2023 [October 18th, 2023]
- A DEEPer (squared) dive into AI Harvard Gazette - Harvard Gazette - October 18th, 2023 [October 18th, 2023]
- Florida bar weighs whether lawyers using AI need client consent - Reuters - October 18th, 2023 [October 18th, 2023]
- Cognizant and Vianai Systems Announce Strategic Partnership to ... - PR Newswire - October 18th, 2023 [October 18th, 2023]
- How AI could speed up scientific discoveries, from proteins to ... - NPR - October 18th, 2023 [October 18th, 2023]
- AI challenge to deliver better healthcare | Western Australian ... - Government of Western Australia - October 18th, 2023 [October 18th, 2023]
- Henry Kissinger: The Path to AI Arms Control - Foreign Affairs Magazine - October 18th, 2023 [October 18th, 2023]
- Stability AI releases StableStudio in latest push for open-source AI - The Verge - May 18th, 2023 [May 18th, 2023]
- Google CEO Sundar Pichai Predicts That This Profession Will Be ... - The Motley Fool - May 18th, 2023 [May 18th, 2023]
- Frances privacy watchdog eyes protection against data scraping in AI action plan - TechCrunch - May 18th, 2023 [May 18th, 2023]
- Investing in Hippocratic AI - Andreessen Horowitz - May 18th, 2023 [May 18th, 2023]
- As Alphabet flexes its AI prowess, there's a 'new elephant in the room' for Google - MarketWatch - May 18th, 2023 [May 18th, 2023]
- The Boring Future of Generative AI | WIRED - WIRED - May 18th, 2023 [May 18th, 2023]
- OpenAI readies new open-source AI model, The Information reports - Reuters.com - May 18th, 2023 [May 18th, 2023]
- What every CEO should know about generative AI - McKinsey - May 18th, 2023 [May 18th, 2023]
- AI creates images of the 'perfect' man and woman - Sky News - May 18th, 2023 [May 18th, 2023]
- Audit AI search tools now, before they skew research - Nature.com - May 18th, 2023 [May 18th, 2023]
- 3 Reasons C3.ai Stock Could Be Your Golden Ticket to the AI ... - InvestorPlace - May 18th, 2023 [May 18th, 2023]
- Zoom makes a big bet on AI with investment in Anthropic - VentureBeat - May 18th, 2023 [May 18th, 2023]
- AI voice phone scams are on the rise. Here's how to avoid them - USA TODAY - May 18th, 2023 [May 18th, 2023]
- Amazon is building an AI-powered conversational experience for ... - The Verge - May 18th, 2023 [May 18th, 2023]
- AI speculators need to 'differentiate between actual spending and investment' and hype: Strategist - Yahoo Finance - May 18th, 2023 [May 18th, 2023]
- AI Can Be Both Accurate and Transparent - HBR.org Daily - May 18th, 2023 [May 18th, 2023]
- You're Probably Underestimating AI Chatbots | WIRED - WIRED - May 18th, 2023 [May 18th, 2023]
- AI presents political peril for 2024 with threat to mislead voters - The Associated Press - May 18th, 2023 [May 18th, 2023]
- We need AI to help us face the challenges of the future - The Guardian - May 18th, 2023 [May 18th, 2023]
- End Of Googles Dominance? Stock Gets Rare Analyst Downgrade Over AI Fears - Forbes - May 18th, 2023 [May 18th, 2023]
- Watch 44 million atoms simulated using AI and a supercomputer - New Scientist - May 18th, 2023 [May 18th, 2023]
- AI Is The New Electricity: Bank Of America Picks 20 Stocks To Cash In On ChatGPT Hype - Forbes - March 2nd, 2023 [March 2nd, 2023]
- Tech Giants Are Barreling Headfirst Into an AI Arms Race - February 20th, 2023 [February 20th, 2023]
- Bing's AI Is Threatening Users. That's No Laughing Matter - TIME - February 20th, 2023 [February 20th, 2023]