Artificial intelligence has been the bogeyman of science fiction since before it even existed for real. But while humanoid robots are still very much a work in progress, AI research keeps making big advances quietly behind the scenes. And it's absolutely starting to get weird.

5 An AI Learned To Half-Ass Its Work, Then Lie About It

It's nice to imagine that we can avoid the sci-fi cliche of a bloody scientist screaming "But ... but I created you! I AM YOUR MASTER!" at a hunk of metal. But even if AI isn't learning to eviscerate us, it's still learning to do things like cut corners in ways that a supervisor won't notice.

Continue Reading Below Advertisement

This one came up on a project from a Stanford and Google research team. They were using a neural network to convert aerial photos into maps. The AI was very good at its job. Almost ... too good. So the researchers checked the data and found that the AI was cheating. They wanted it to create a new map based on aerial photos, and graded the AI on how close the map's features matched the pics. But instead of actually constructing a new map, the AI quietly copied the data from the photos ... and did it in a way that the humans wouldn't easily notice.

It gets a bit technical here, but it was basically the neural network equivalent of an art student saying they painted a self-portrait when they really just messed with a selfie in Photoshop to make it look like brush strokes. To quote the TechCrunch article linked above:

Continue Reading Below Advertisement

"The details of the aerial map are secretly written into the actual visual data of the street map: thousands of tiny changes in color that the human eye wouldn't notice, but that the computer can easily detect ... The machine, not smart enough to do the actual difficult job of converting these sophisticated image types to each other, found a way to cheat that humans are bad at detecting."