Research: Artificial intelligence researchers have robots read books to help them understand how to behave in a human way. They teach computers ethics in the same way children are taught how to behave in human societies.
“The collected stories of different cultures teach children how to behave in socially acceptable ways with examples of proper and improper behavior in fables, novels and other literature,” says associate professor Mark Riedl, director of the Entertainment Intelligence Lab in a press release. “We believe story comprehension in robots can eliminate psychotic-appearing behavior and reinforce choices that won’t harm humans and still achieve the intended purpose.”
The abstract of the research says: Value alignment is a property of an intelligent agent indicating that it can only pursue goals that are beneficial to humans. Successful value alignment should ensure that an artificial general intelligence cannot intentionally or unintentionally perform behaviors that adversely affect humans. This is problematic in practice since it is difficult to exhaustively enumerated by human programmers. In order for successful value alignment, we argue that values should be learned. In this paper, we hypothesize that an artificial intelligence that can read and understand stories can learn the values tacitly held by the culture from which the stories originate. We describe preliminary work on using stories to generate a value-aligned reward signal for reinforcement learning agents that prevents psychotic-appearing behavior.
