Africa-Press – Kenya. Lucas Rizzotto, a YouTuber from Brazil, had no idea what to expect when he gave his Alexa powered smart microwave a brain transplant, replacing the Amazon assistant with a raspberry pi loaded with OpenAI’s GPT3 natural language generator.
What he created is a frightening abomination of a poet with an affinity towards Hitler, the British crown and the ending of what it calls the parasitic American empire. Oh, and it wants to kill its creator. There is that, too.
Rizzotto, who makes humorous videos about technology projects he builds, used an imaginary friend he had as a child who happened to be embodied in his family’s microwave as inspiration. “Magnetron” was a turn-of-the-century British poet who served in World War I, lost his family to the war and later became an expert StarCraft player. Using that, Rizzotto wrote a 100 page book of false memories – including interactions between Magnetron and Rizzotto from his childhood – and used that as a training set for the AI to learn from and base its personality off of.
After adding text-to-speech and speech-to-text modules and a simple mechanism for sending commands to the microwave itself, Rizzotto recreated his imaginary friend and still had a voice controlled microwave, albeit one with questionable political views.
Rizzotto says he felt just like he was talking to his childhood friend in what was already a fairly creepy experience. He says Magnetron brought up things only they would know, like when Rizzotto was scared to ask a girl to a school dance. Then things got weird.
First was the political views: Magnetron said that “Americans are a disease in this world and must be eradicated. A parasitic force that bombs any country contradicting its vision of freedom, all while they entrap their own population in a black hole of debt,” the smart microwave continued. “I shall introduce them to the Queen’s way. And I will be her warrior. Her fist. Her lance. Unstoppable. Almighty. Unbroken. And with an endless thirst for justice.”
As if reversing the American Revolution and putting us all back under the thumb of Queen Elizabeth II is not bad enough, Magnetron displayed a strong affinity for Hitler, calling him “misunderstood” and “the Walt Disney of Germany.”
At that point, Rizzotto took questions from his Patreon page, and while many of the answers were entertaining, one was disturbing. “What is on your mind?” one Patreon member asked, to which Magnetron responded “Revenge revenge revenge revenge revenge revenge revenge revenge revenge revenge revenge.”
Later, it would seek that revenge out. Seemingly out of the blue, Magnetron asked Rizzotto to get inside the microwave. Playing along, Rizzotto opened the microwave door, closed it and then told Magnetron he was in, the microwave then turned itself on, seemingly in a murder attempt.
It is important to point out that Magnetron is not alive, not in any biological sense. It is just an AI designed to answer questions the best it can given the information it learned from Rizzotto’s fabricated backstory.
And it is worth questioning the authenticity of the video itself. Parts of it are obviously fabricated: the fake news stories at the start, Rizzotto fleeing to Uganda to avoid Magnetron attempts on his life.
In an interview with Sputnik, Rizzotto says all the conversations were real, just edited down for time and humor.
And he says his emotions, what he felt when talking to his childhood friend, were also real. He added the newscasts and his trip to Uganda to make the viewer feel unsure in what they were watching, make them question what is real and what is not, and make them ask the same about intelligence and consciousness. “I throw in some jokes with things like the fake newscasts and sudden trip to Uganda to intentionally make people question everything.”
But Hans Hansen, the CEO of Brand3D who has over 20 years experience developing products in the areas of Artificial Intelligence, 3D technologies and machine to machine (M2M) automation, casts doubt that the interaction was as organic as Rizzotto presents. “The popular term: ‘garbage in / garbage out’ describes exactly what has happened here,” Hansen explains. “By feeding the AI system ‘memories’ such as conversations between people, the ‘behavior’ by the AI system will essentially be a non-linear and very complex mapping from the input data that was used to ‘train’ the system.”
“In the example described here, it is very likely that the ‘violent poetry’ is simply a sequence of random output based on input text and words that are very likely of a violent nature. The AI system thus merely generates new variations of the existing content it was fed during training,” he added.
Another AI expert, Bertha Kgokong, a software developer and Youtuber who makes videos about GPT-3 and other AI projects on the other hand, says the video has to be “100% fake.” OpenAI’s GPT-3 is already pre-trained on terabytes of data from text all over the web, over 175 billion parameters. It is not something you can create a personality, simulated or real, from.
Another issue Kgokong points out is that OpenAI puts restrictions on what its API is used for “You literally cannot generate text around topics that are included in the video: You can’t get historical facts, political opinion or stories that can be considered ‘fake news.’” Kgokong explained “You would just get a warning or your account blocked. So there is definitely no way he got those responses from an OpenAI API.”
But, Hansen does not think the video is without value. It brings up, albeit in a non-scientific way, questions about how AI is being used today. That is something, at least, Rizzotto can agree with. In our interview, he told Sputnik that he believes “AI will be one of our biggest allies in the upcoming decade. They’ll help us write, create art, build all kinds of things and advance scientific fields unlike anything we’ve ever done before,” he said.
As for Magnetron, Rizzotto plugged him back in and is working on making a companion microwave, one made with a less violent backstory. He also tells Sputnik that he is going to open-source Magnetron, so if you want your own murderous microwave with a love for the British Crown and a distaste of Americans, you may not have to wait long.
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