Credits: Social Media
AI Chatbots understand sarcasm as well as most humans, which is a scary thought
A 2023 study conducted by Juliann Zhou of New York University uncovered that two language representation models, similar to those that power AI chatbots, can understand sarcasm almost as well as humans.
Artificial intelligence is slowly creeping into almost every aspect of our daily lives and while certain advancements are likely to be a benefit to society, that may not necessarily be the case for every new development as a recent study into natural language processing (NLP) shows.
Study finds that AI chatbots could understand sarcasm almost as well as humans
A study published by Juliann Zhou of New York University in October 2023 examined how well AI-driven NLP tools can understand sarcasm in online comments.
The sarcasm-detecting tools in question were ContextuAl SarCasm Detector (CASCADE) and Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers (BERT).
These programs were then used to analyze a sample of 3,406 posts on Reddits r/politics page, which were split 50/50 between sarcastic and non-sarcastic comments.
According to the study, humans could correctly identify sarcasm 82% of the time while the CASCADE and BERT programs could detect sarcastic comments with 74% and 79% accuracy respectively.
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Opinion: Sarcastic AI is a scary thought
Early iterations of AI Chatbots such as Cleverbot began simply as a means of entertainment as users experimented to see how well artificial intelligence could hold a conversation. The answer: not very well.
However, as AI chatbots have grown increasingly sophisticated, such as ChatGPT, their capabilities and uses have only grown more wide-ranging.
It is getting to the point where AI-powered smart assistants can be found in almost every home, customer service chatbots are commonplace, self-driving cars are becoming a reality and it likely wont be long before AI is used in areas like healthcare, such as for robot-assisted surgeries.
If an AI chatbot can detect sarcasm, could it get to the point where one could dish out sassy comments in return or even take issue with a sarcastic human? While this could be used for some hilarious and scathing chatbot conversations, would it stop there?
What if a self-driving car took issue with the sarcastic way its owner asked it to plot a new route home after encountering roadworks or a customer service bot didnt appreciate the frustrated tone of an exasperated customer?
Of course, all of these issues are hypothetical (for now) and almost certainly depend on how the AI tools in question are programmed but its worrying to think what could happen if we let our imaginations run a little wild and we picture cars that refuse to move (or even crash deliberately) and chatbots that send people into never-ending loops of unhelpful advice.
