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Robots Could Learn Human Values By Reading Stories, Research Suggests
Mark Riedl and Brent Harrison from the School of Interactive Computing at the Georgia Institute of Technology have just unveiled Quixote, a prototype system that is able to learn social conventions from simple stories. Or, as they put in their paper Using Stories to Teach Human Values to Artificial Agents, revealed at the AAAI-16 Conference in Phoenix, Arizona this week, the stories are used "to generate a value-aligned reward signal for reinforcement learning agents that prevents psychotic-appearing behavior." "The AI ... runs many thousands of virtual simulations in which it tries out different things and gets rewarded every time it does an action similar to something in the story," said Riedl, associate professor and director of the Entertainment Intelligence Lab. "Over time, the AI learns to prefer doing certain things and avoiding doing certain other things. We find that Quixote can learn how to perform a task the same way humans tend to do it. This is significant because if an AI were given the goal of simply returning home with a drug, it might steal the drug because that takes the fewest actions and uses the fewest resources. The point being that the standard metrics for success (eg, efficiency) are not socially best." Quixote has not learned the lesson of "do not steal," Riedl says, but "simply prefers to not steal after reading and emulating the stories it was provided."