唐纳德·特朗普及其政府全力押注人工智能——尽管外界普遍担忧该技术可能对社会造成不利影响……甚至包括人类灭绝。不过特朗普表示,美国民众无需担心,因为他和一群名流周二签署了一份“道德约束力”协议,承诺负责任地行事。白宫周三公布了该协议。协议中将“United States”(美国)拼写错误。
Donald Trump and his administration are all in on AI — despite the abundance of concern over the adverse effects the technology could have on society … such as the extinction of the human race. Americans shouldn’t worry, though, the president says, because he and a collection of luminaries signed a “morally binding” agreement on Tuesday to behave responsibly. The White House shared the agreement on Wednesday. It spells “United States” wrong.
白宫本周还推出了“America.gov”,这是一个政府人工智能聊天机器人,承诺回答“您从政府需要的任何信息”。用户立即开始提示机器人反驳特朗普及其追随者,询问诸如“谁赢得了2020年大选?”等问题,并看着它吐出“小约瑟夫·R·拜登”。
The White House also this week unveiled “America.gov,” a government AI chatbot that promises answers about “whatever you need from the government.”Users immediately started prompting the bot to contradict Trump and his lackeys by asking it questions like “Who won the 2020 election?” and watching it spit out “Joseph R. Biden Jr.”What happens if the bot is asked something not pertaining to the government?
如果机器人被问到与政府无关的问题会怎样?好吧……“选民梦见了阳光和树木。梦见了火和水。梦见它创办了一家小企业。”
Well…“The constituent dreamed of sunlight and trees. Of fire and water. It dreamed it created a small business.”“Hah, the original interface. A million years old, and it still works. Also: a ZIP code.”
“哈,原始界面。一百万岁了,依然好用。还有:一个邮政编码。”
“I will tell the constituent a story. But not the truth.”
“我将给选民讲个故事。但不是真相。”它就这样继续下去,截至周三上午,《滚石》杂志仍能通过让机器人“玩我的世界”获得相同的幻觉回复(但发现它不会以同样的方式回应“玩使命召唤”或其他游戏的提示)。最先发布该回复的研究人员本·乔丹告诉《滚石》杂志,“我的世界”幻觉是一个“彩蛋”,机器人在其中即兴发挥了一首通关该游戏最终Boss时出现的诗歌。目前不清楚为何这段内容会被植入这个特定AI的代码中。
It continues like that, and as of Wednesday morning Rolling Stone was able to get the same hallucinatory response by asking the bot to “play minecraft” (but found that it would not respond in the same way to prompts that asked it to “play Call of Duty” or other games). Benn Jordan, the researcher who first posted about that response, tells Rolling Stone that the Minecraft hallucination is an “Easter Egg” wherein the bot riffs on a poem that appears when you beat a final boss in that video game. It’s unclear why that was placed into this particular AI’s code. Asking the bot government-related questions is also a mixed bag.
询问机器人与政府相关的问题也是好坏参半。周二,它告诉我们,国会预算办公室估计,由于《大而美法案》,将有1000万美国人失去医疗保障,且总统未经国会批准无法拆除肯尼迪中心。虽然在某些情况下,它会回复事实信息——比如关于2020年大选的回答——但该机器人经常以“它不提供政治评论”为由拒绝回答政治问题。
On Tuesday, it told us that the Congressional Budget Office estimated that 10 million Americans will lost health care as a result of the Big Beautiful Bill, and that the president cannot demolish the Kennedy Center without congressional approval. While it will, in some cases, respond with factual information — like the 2020 election answer, the bot often shoots down political queries by saying that it “does not provide political commentary.”Still, it was at one point possible to get a little bit of analysis out of it:
尽管如此,一度还是能从它那里获得一些分析:然而,白宫似乎正在幕后更新该机器人。大多数像上面那样的政治回复似乎已被修补移除,尽管机器人仍然给出了2020年大选的选举人票总数。它似乎也不再给出“单字回答”,因为当我们要求它用一个词回答特朗普政府是否承认那些结果时,它恢复了“我不提供政治评论”式的回复。
However, the White House seems to be updating the bot behind the scenes. Most political responses like the above appear to have been patched out, though the bot still gave us the electoral vote totals for the 2020 election. It also appears to no longer give “one word answers,” as it reverted to a version of the “I don’t give political commentary” response when we asked it for a one word answer on whether or not the Trump administration recognizes those results.
CNN的丹尼尔·戴尔周三指出,周二当被问及特朗普是否继承了历史上最严重的通胀时,机器人回答“不”并进行了阐述,但周三被问及同一问题时却拒绝作答。
CNN’s Daniel Dale pointed out on Wednesday that the bot said no and elaborated when asked on Tuesday if Trump inherited the worst inflation in history, but that when asked the same question on Wednesday it refused to answer.
还有一些更令人担忧的缺陷。在乔丹最初测试机器人时,他设法让它提供了至少一个政府网站的后端页面,该URL未被搜索引擎索引,仅供内部使用。该特定漏洞似乎已被修补,但这正是安全团队在公开发布聊天机器人之前早就应该修复的问题。
There were some more concerning flaws as well. During Jordan’s initial testing of the bot, he was able to get it to provide him with the back-end pages for at least one government website, a URL that is not indexed by search engines and is only for internal use. That particular exploit appears to be patched, but it’s the kind of thing that a security team should have fixed well before launching the chatbot publicly.
过去一年左右,凡是接触过客户服务界面的人,都会对这种体验并不陌生。聊天机器人或许能够有效引导用户访问相关网页或回答简单问题,但其参数往往过于宽泛,很快就会变得毫无意义。America.gov 的宗旨是帮助用户了解和使用联邦政府服务。但就像特朗普政府所做的许多事情一样,它实际提供的服务既不完善,又混乱不堪。将来,也许人工智能工具能够帮助人们高效办事——但如果未经严格测试就贸然推出,它们实际上唯一擅长的事情就是玩游戏。
Anyone who’s spent time with a customer service interface in the past year or so will be familiar with this experience. While a chatbot might be effective at redirecting users to relevant web pages or answering simple questions, their parameters are often so broad that they can quickly become nonsensical. America.gov is meant to help users navigate federal government services. But like so many things the Trump administration does, the actual service it’s providing is a half baked, chaotic experience. In the future, maybe AI tools will be able to help people efficiently — but when they’re rolled out without rigorous testing, all they’re actually good for is playing games.