Common sense isn’t common, especially when it comes to artificial intelligence. Computers struggle to make fine distinctions that people take for granted. This is why websites require you authenticate your humanity before logging in or making a purchase: Most bots can’t tell the difference between a crosswalk and a zebra.
At the USC AI Futures Symposium on AI with Common Sense earlier this month, more than 20 USC researchers reported on the technical reasons why that’s the case, and different avenues of research to address this. Advances in common sense AI will improve human-facing services, from enhanced social services to better serve society to personal assistants that better predict our context and needs.
“AI systems today can converse with us to order a book, find a song, or vacuum our floors,” said Yannis Yortsos, dean of the USC Viterbi School of Engineering. “But they do not have the common sense to know that we read books for learning and for pleasure, that music relaxes us, and that tidy homes are more enjoyable. Mindsets taking into account human interaction must be applied in tackling the commonsense challenge for AI as we are laying the foundations for AI to be responsible and ethical, and to impact society in meaningful ways.”
AI still makes ‘silly mistakes’
Today’s AI systems can’t make presumptions about situations or information that people encounter daily. Your phone’s camera for instance, reads the visual information in frame and focuses on a particular subject utilizing AI. However, differentiating between a white shirt and a white wall can cause AI to fail because it doesn’t recognize the other differences between a shirt and wall, only the color.
To help overcome this challenge, researchers use several sources of commonplace knowledge like Wikidata to obtain a “reasoned” AI response. Filip Ilievski, research scientist at USC’s Information Sciences Institute (ISI) and organizer of the symposium, has developed an AI-based program using multiple sources of commonsense knowledge to complete a human-initiated story. For instance, a user might type in, “I am at home and I want to warm up but there is no blanket” and the AI would reply, “Use a jacket.”
We keep finding one of the key obstacles preventing us from integrating AI capabilities is the lack of common sense.
Filip Ilievski, USC’s Information Sciences Institute
“We keep finding one of the key obstacles preventing us from integrating AI capabilities is the lack of common sense,” he said. “On one hand we have AI that is capable of very …….
Source: https://news.usc.edu/195978/commonsense-artificial-intelligence-ai/
