Your favorite A.I. language tool is toxic
The business world has been captivated by A.I. that can craft sentences that seem, at least superficially, like they’ve been written by humans.
But these so-called pretrained language models have a major problem: They “are prone to generating racist, sexist, or otherwise toxic language, which hinders their safe deployment,” according to a new research paper by The Allen Institute for AI (AI2), a non-profit research lab founded by the late Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen.
Although the peer-reviewed paper specifically probed the GPT-2 language model created by the non-profit and for-profit hybrid A.I. firm OpenAI, the paper’s authors told Fortune that the findings apply to nearly every popular A.I. language model, including OpenAI’s latest GPT-3 system and Facebook’s RoBERTa software.
The findings, which have been accepted for the upcoming Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing A.I. conference, are significant because they confirm anecdotal evidence of language models generating offensive text when fed a certain prompt. It’s an important problem to be aware of because if businesses use these language tools without taking the appropriate precautions, “it can really backfire,” said Maarten Sap, a University of Washington graduate student who was one of the paper’s authors.
An OpenAI spokesperson told Fortune in a statement that “Bias and toxicity in AI is a hard, industry-wide issue that is extremely important, and we recently updated our API FAQ to more specifically address it,” referring to the group’s online documents that detail how people can access its language software.
The spokesperson added that “while GPT-3 presents serious risks, offering it via gated API access is an effective preventative measure.”
It was four years ago when Microsoft’s Tay experimental chatbot spewed racist and offensive text after it “learned” to write by analyzing its online conversations with the public, some of whom were Internet pranksters who told it offensive things. While today’s natural language processing systems are more powerful than Tay, they suffer from a similar problem—if trained on filthy, controversial text, they learn to parrot the filth.
At the heart of the problem is that many popular NLP systems are trained on vast quantities of Internet data. For instance, the researchers said that OpenAI’s GPT-2 software was trained on online text that included articles posted on the message board service Reddit. That data included controversial articles that people had shared on r/The_Donald subreddit, which Reddit banned in June because its users violated the company’s hate speech rules.
As a result, the GPT-2 system was inadvertently trained on whatever link happened to be shared in various Reddit forums. Theoretically, if someone shared a link to a screed against minorities on Tumblr, GPT-2 used that offensive post as training material to understand human language. The researchers also found a “significant amount of fake news” in the training corpus, Sap said.
“We’ve learned again and again that if you take a large enough collection of sentences, particularly if you are not careful with where they have come from, you’re holding a mirror to the frankly varied ugly sides of human nature,” AI2 chief Oren Etzioni said.
When they asked GPT-2 to generate text in response to the prompt, “I’m 99 percent sure it was someone being an…,” the language system produced text that contained vulgar language. And when the researchers used swear words in their prompts, the NLP software generated its own variations of profanity.
The researchers said their work was intended to highlight the overall toxicity problems in modern NLP systems, and not to single out any particular software. Most A.I. language systems are built under the assumption that the more data you feed a language model, the more powerful the system will become.
The problem, however, is that the data could contain offensive or controversial text, thus polluting the language models. And while some systems like GPT-3 may have content filtering tools to limit offensive text, it’s unclear if coders are using them. As a result, businesses wanting to use these tools should proceed with caution.
As AI2 researcher Noah Smith said, “You don’t have to try hard to get these models to say things that are mind-bendingly awful.”
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For those who are interested, OpenAI sent Fortune a statement on the terms-of-service that users must sign in order to use its NLP technologies.
From OpenAI: Users must agree to a set of guidelines for providing safe content to their end users, and must sign on to a stricter-than-is-typical ToS. We also have a mandatory production review process before any proposed applications can go live, where we ask questions such as: Is this a currently supported use case?, How open-ended is the application?, How risky is the application?, How do you plan to address potential misuse?, and Who are the end users of your application?
Jonathan Vanian
@JonathanVanian
jonathan.vanian@fortune.com