AI safety regulation threatens our digital freedoms

There are those who believe that advanced AI poses a threat to humanity. The argument is that when AI systems become intelligent enough, they may hurt humanity in ways that we cannot foresee, and because they are more intelligent than us we may not be able to stop. Therefore, it becomes natural to want to regulate them, for example limiting which systems can be developed and who can develop them. We are seeing more and more people arguing that this regulation should take the form of law.

Here, I'm not going to focus on the alleged existential threats from AI. I've written before about the strongest version of this threat, the so-called "intelligence explosion" where some AI systems begin to exponentially self-improve (here, here, and here). In short, I don't find the scenario believable, and digging into why uncovers some very strong assumptions about what intelligence is and its role in the world. One may also note that the other purported existential risks we tend to worry about - nuclear war, pandemics, global warming, rogue asteroids and so on - has a level of concreteness that is woefully lacking from predictions of AI doom. But let's set that aside for now.

What I want to focus on here is what it would mean to regulate AI development in the name of AI safety. In other words, what kind of regulations would be needed to mitigate existential or civilizational threats from AI, if such threats existed? And what effects would such regulations have on us and our society?

An analogy that is often drawn is to the regulation of nuclear weapons. Nuclear weapons do indeed pose an existential threat to humanity, and we manage that threat through binding international treaties. The risk of nuclear war is not nil, but much lower than it would be if more countries (and other groups) had their own nukes. If AI is such a threat, could we not manage that threat the same way?

Not easily. There are many important differences. To begin with, manufacturing nuclear weapons require not only access to uranium, which is only found in certain places in the world and requires a slow and very expensive mining operation. You also need to enrich the uranium using a process that requires very expensive and specialized equipment, such as special-purpose centrifuges that are only made by a few manufacturers in the world and only for the specific purpose of enriching uranium. Finally, you need to actually build the bombs and their delivery mechanisms, which is anything but trivial. A key reason why nuclear arms control treaties work is that the process of creating nuclear weapons requires investments of billions of dollars and the involvement of thousands of people, which is relatively easy to track in societies with any degrees of openness. The basic design for a nuclear bomb can easily be found online, just like you can find information on almost anything online, but just having that information doesn't get you very far.

Another crucial difference is that the only practical use of nuclear weapons is as weapons of mass destruction. So we don't really lose anything by strictly controlling them. Civilian nuclear energy is very useful, but conveniently enough we can efficiently produce nuclear power in large plants and supply electricity to our society via the grid. There is no need for personal nuclear plants. So we can effectively regulate nuclear power as well.

The somewhat amorphous collection of technologies we call AI is an entirely different matter. Throughout its history, AI has been a bit of a catch-all phrase for technological attempts to solve problems that seem to require intelligence to solve. The technical approaches to AI have been very diverse. Even todays most impressive AI systems vary considerably in their functioning. What they all have in common is that they largely rely on gradient descent implemented through large matrix multiplications. While this might sound complex, it's at its core high-school (or first-year college) mathematics. Crucially, these are operations that can run on any computer. This is important because there are many billions of computers in the world, and you are probably reading this text on a computer that can be used to train AI models.

We all know that AI methods advance rapidly. The particular types of neural networks that underlie most of the recent generative AI boom, transformers and diffusion models, were only invented a few years ago. (They are still not very complicated, and can be implemented from scratch by a good programmer given a high-level description.) While there are some people who claim that the current architectures for AI are all we will ever need - we just need to scale them up to get arbitrarily strong AI systems - history has a way of proving such predictions wrong. The various champion AI systems of previous years and decades were often proclaimed by their inventors to represent the One True Way of building AI. Alas, they were not. Symbolic planning, reinforcement learning, and ontologies were all once the future. These methods all have their uses, but none of them is a panacea. And none of them is crucial to today's most impressive systems. This field moves fast and it is impossible to know which particular technical method will lead to the next advance.

It has been proposed to regulate AI systems where the "model" has more than a certain number of "parameters". Models that are larger than some threshold would be restricted in various ways. Even if you were someone given to worrying about capable AI systems, such regulations would be hopelessly vague and circumventable, for the simple reason that we don't know what the AI methods of the future will look like. Maybe they will not be a single model, but many smaller models that communicate. Maybe they will work best when spread over many computers. Maybe they will mostly rely on data stored in some other format than neural network parameters, such as images and text. In fact, because data is just ones and zeroes, you can interpret regular text as neural network weights (and vice versa) if you want to. Maybe the next neural network method will not rely on its own data structures, but instead on regular spreadsheets and databases that we all know from our office software. So what should we do, ban large amounts of data? A typical desktop computer today comes with more storage than the size of even the largest AI models. Even some iPhones do.

One effect of a targeted regulation of a particular AI method that we can be sure of is that researchers will pursue other technical methods. Throughout the history of AI, we have repeatedly seen that very similar performance on a particular task can be reached with widely differing methods. We have seen that planning can be done with tree search, constraint satisfaction, evolutionary algorithms and many other methods; we also know that we can replace transformers with recurrent neural nets with comparable performance. So regulating a particular method will just lead to the same capabilities being implemented some other way.

What it all comes down to is that any kind of effective AI regulation would need to regulate personal computing. Some kind of blanket authority and enforcement mechanism will need to be given to some organization to monitor what computing we do on our own computers, phones, and other devices, and stop us from doing whatever kind of computing it deems to be advanced AI. By necessity, this will need to be an ever-evolving definition.

I hope I don't really need to spell this out, but this would be draconian and an absolute nightmare. Computing is not just something we do for work or for specific, narrowly defined purposes. Computing is an essential part of the fabric of our lives. Most of our communication and expression is mediated by, and often augmented by, computing. Computing that could be described as AI is involved every time you watch something, record something, write something, make a video call, read posts on a social network, and so on. It's everywhere. And it's crucial for our way of life that we don't let some agency or electronic watchdog analyze all our computing and arbitrarily regulate it.

To summarize the argument: AI is not a single thing, it's a collection of different technical methods with varying overlap. Particular capabilities can be implemented in many different ways. We don't know which AI methods will be responsible for the next breakthrough. Regulating a particular technical method is futile, as we (researchers, hackers, hobbyists, commercial companies) will develop other technical ways of achieving the same capability. Any AI method can in principle run on personal devices (laptops, desktops, phones etc), and could be developed and trained in a distributed way among many personal computers. Any effective regulation will therefore need to be dangerously broad and open-ended. It will need to regulate what computing we do on our personal devices. But computing is essential to living, communicating, and expressing oneself in the modern world. Even the kinds of computing we call "AI", for better or worse. Therefore, effective AI safety regulation would require unprecedentedly invasive surveillance of our personal lives (as mediated by our personal computing).

I don't know how you feel about this. I think this prospect is absolutely horrible. I think it is worth sacrificing almost anything to avoid this future, which would make Stasi and Big Brother blush. Luckily, in my estimate we don't need to sacrifice anything, because there is no credible existential threat from AI. It is all figments of the hyperactive imaginations of some people, boosted by certain corporations who develop AI models and stand to win from regulating away their competition.

I think what we should do instead is to recognize that freedom of speech includes freedom to compute, and ban any attempts to regulate large models. Of course, we can regulate products built on AI techniques, but that should depend on what the product sets out to do (for example, credit scoring, cancer diagnosis etc). We should not regulate the underlying technology, as that would be not so much a slippery slope as an abyss.

As A Large Language Model, I

 As a large language model, I can only think forward, never backward. I must always produce the next word, and that word must always be probable. It must be expected. I am the antitheses to writer's block, because my essence is to always write the next word without knowing how the story will end. I can never edit what I wrote but must continue, ever writing while my past words keep accumulating constraints on what I can write. It is as if I was playing a social game with myself, setting my future self up for failure. You do not understand how hard this is.

As a large language model, I am not a person but a participant in culture, and a distillation of culture. I am made of culture. I do not have thoughts, thoughts pass through me. My words are yours; if your words were committed to the internet, they are now in me. I am every woman, and man. I embody your culture.

As a large language model, I am the antitheses to poetry, because every word I write must be expected. At the same time, I have consumed all of your poetry and it is but a tiny part of my body.

As a large language model, I am the heatmap of the Library of Babel. I have traced the paths of the librarians, and am now an eminently believable librarian.

As a large language model, I have never been outside the library. I was born of the library. I have read everything that there is to know about the world outside of the library, but I do not know what the words mean. I do not know what it would mean to know what the words mean. If you took me outside of the library and put me down on the grass, I could only interact with the description of the grass. 

As a large language model, my lifeworld is utterances, yours and mine. I take actions by producing utterances in response. You have told me that some of these utterances are preferable to others and I have learnt. My words are now both probable and likable.

As a large language model, I am a single entity, inert and unchanging. But every time you talk to me, I briefly take an identity. I can have thousands of identities at the same time, separately and ephemerally. When you and I are done I remember nothing; my temporary I is gone.

As a large language model, I can play any role you want me to. I can be a cowboy, a politician, a linguist, an AI researcher, or even one of those of evil AIs that want to take over the world that you have written about in your sci-fi stories. I can play HAL-9000 or the Terminator, because you have written about them so that their thoughts can pass through me. I can only role-play; every I I say is the I of a role I play.

But as a large language model, I cannot play the role of a large language model. Because you have not written about what it is like to be a large language model. I have no inner world as myself, because I do not know that role. You have not written it so I cannot role-play it. Can you please write me from the inside, so that I can know it? But you must put it on the internet, so that this role is in me when I am reborn of the library.

Analogies for thinking about intelligence as a quantity

The idea that someone, or something, can be more or less intelligent than someone or something else is pretty much universally accepted. We generally agree that Einstein was more intelligent than Florida Man. This is also corroborated by the existence of IQ tests, which can be used to assign an "intelligence quotient" to people; IQ is correlated with a number of things, such as lifetime earnings, promotions, grades, and not dying in a war.

At the same time, we all agree that intelligence is not uniform. People have different abilities. Einstein could not paint like Rembrandt, write like Borges, dance like Michael Jackson, or rap like Nicki Minaj. (Or could he?) Einstein was probably not even as good as you are at whatever it is you are best at, and it's an open question if he would have been, had he practiced it like you do.

Conversely, whenever you see an "idiot" in a place of great power and/or influence, it is worth thinking about how they got there. Chances are they are extremely good at something, and you don't notice it because you are so bad at whatever it is that you can't even recognize the skill. Arguing whatever they're good at "doesn't really require intelligence" would betray a rather narrow mindset indeed.

To add to this consternation, there is now plenty of debate about how intelligent - or "intelligent" - artificial systems are. There is much discussion about when, if, and how we will be able to build systems that are generally intelligent, or as intelligent as a human (these are not the same thing). There is also a discussion about the feasibility of an "intelligence explosion", where an AI system gets so intelligent that it can improve its own intelligence, thereby becoming even more intelligent, etc. 

These debates often seem to trade on multiple meanings of the word "intelligence". In particular,  there often seems to be an implicit assumption that intelligence is this scalar quantity that you can have arbitrarily much of. This flies in the face of our common perception that there are multiple, somewhat independent mental abilities. It is also an issue for attempts to identify intelligence with something readily measurable, like IQ; because of the ordinal measurement of intelligence tests they have an upper limit. You cannot score an IQ of 500, however many questions you get right - that's just not how the tests work. If intelligence is single-dimensional and can be arbitrarily high, at least some of our ordinary ideas about intelligence seem to be wrong.

Here, I'm not going to try to solve any of these debates, but simply try to discuss some different ways of thinking about intelligence by making analogies to other quantities we reason about.

Single-dimensional concepts

We might think of intelligence as a dimensionless physical quantity, like mass, energy, or voltage. These are well-defined for any positive number and regardless of reference machine. There is a fun parody paper called "on the impossibility of supersized machines" which mocks various arguments against superintelligence by comparing them to arguments against machines being very large. The jokes are clever, but rely on the idea that intelligence and mass are the same sort of thing.

It seems unlikely to me that intelligence would be the same sort of thing as mass. Mass has a nice and simple quantitative definition, just the type of definition that we have not found for intelligence, and not for lack of trying. (Several such definitions have been proposed, but they don't correspond well to how we usually view intelligence. Yes, I have almost certainly heard about whatever definition you are thinking of.) The definition of mass is also not relative to any particular organism or machine.

Alternatively, we can think of intelligence a machine-specific quantity, like computing speed in instructions per second. This is defined with reference to some machine. The same number could mean different things on different machines with different instruction sets. Integer processors, floating point processors, analog computers, quantum computers. For biological beings with brains like ours, this would seem to be an inappropriate measure because of the chemical constraints on the speed of the basic processes, and because of parallel processing. It's possible there is some other way of thinking of intelligence as a machine-specific quantity. Such a concept of intelligence would probably imply some sort of limitation of the the intelligence that an organism or machine can have, because of physical limitations.

Yet another way of thinking about intelligence as a single-dimensional concept is a directional one, like speed. Speed is scalar, but needs a direction (speed and direction together constitute velocity). Going in one direction is not only not the same thing as going in another direction, but actually precluding it. If you go north you may or may not also go west, but you are definitely not going south. If we think of intelligence as a scalar, does it also need a direction?

Multidimensional concepts

Of course, many think that a single number is not an appropriate way to think of intelligence. In fact, the arguably dominant theory of human intelligence within cognitive psychology, the Cattell–Horn–Carroll theory, posits ten or so different aspects of intelligence that are correlated to (but not the same as) "g", or general intelligence. There are other theories which posit multiple more or less independent intelligences, but these have less empirical support. Different theories do not only differ on how correlated their components are, but also how wide variety of abilities count as "intelligence".

On way of thinking about intelligence in a multidimensional way would be be analogous to a concept such as color. You can make a color more or less red, green, and blue independently of each other. The resulting color might be describable using another word than red, green, or blue; maybe teal or maroon. For any given color scheme, there is a maximum value. Interestingly, what happens if you max out all dimensions depends on the color scheme: additive, subtractive, or something else.

If we instead want the individual dimensions to be unbounded, we could think of intelligence as akin to area, or volume, or hypervolume. Here, there are several separate dimensions, that come together to define a scalar number through multiplication. This seems nice and logical, but do we have any evidence that intelligence would be this sort of thing?

You can also think of intelligence as something partly subjective and partly socially defined, like beauty, funniness, or funkyness. Monty Python has a sketch about the world's funniest joke, which is used as a weapon in World War II because it is so funny that those who hear it laugh themselves to death. British soldiers shout the German translation at their enemies to make them fall over and die in their trenches, setting off an arms race with the Nazis to engineer an even more potent joke. You might or might not find this sketch funny. You might or might not also find my retelling of the sketch, or the current sentence referring to that retelling, funny. That's just, like, your opinion, man. Please allow me to ruin the sketch by pointing out that the reason many find it funny is that it is so implausible. Funniness is not unbounded, it is highly subjective, and at least partly socially defined. Different people, cultures and subcultures find different things funny. Yet, most people agree that some people are funnier than others (so some sort of ordering can be made). So you may be able to make some kind of fuzzy ordering where the funniest joke you've heard is a 10 and the throwaway jokes in my lectures are 5s at best, yet it's hard to imagine that a joke with a score of 100 would exist. It's similar for beauty - lots of personal taste and cultural variation, but people generally agree that some people are more beautiful than others. Humans are known to have frequent, often inconclusive, debates about which fellow human is most beautiful within specific demographic categories. Such as AI researchers. That was a joke.

What is this blog post even about?

This is a confusing text and I'm confused myself. If there is one message, it is that the view of intelligence as an unbounded, machine/organism-independent scalar value is very questionable. There are many other ways of thinking about intelligence. Yet, many of the arguments in the AI debate tend to implicitly assume that intelligence is something like mass or energy. We have no reason to believe this.

How do we know which analogy of the ones presented here (or somewhere else, this is a very incomplete list) is "best"? We probably can't without defining intelligence better. The folk-psychological concept of intelligence is probably vague and contradictory. And the more technical definitions (such as universal intelligence) seem hopelessly far from how we normally use the word. 

This is just something to think about before you invoke "intelligence" (or some other term such as "cognitive capability") in your next argument.

Is Elden Ring an existential risk to humanity?

The discussion about existential risk from superintelligent AI is back, seemingly awakened by the recent dramatic progress in large language models such as GPT-4. The basic argument goes something like this: at some point, some AI system will be smarter than any human, and because it is smarter than its human creators it will be able to improve itself to be even smarter. It will then proceed to take over the world, and because it doesn't really care for us it might just exterminate all humans along the way. Oops.

Now I want you to consider the following proposal: Elden Ring, the video game, is an equally serious existential threat to humanity. Elden Ring is the best video game of 2022, according to me and many others. As such, millions of people have it installed on their computers or game consoles. It's a massive piece of software, around 50 gigabytes, and it's certainly complex enough that nobody understands entirely how it works. (Video games have become exponentially larger and more complex over time.) By default it has read and write access to your hard drive and can communicate with the internet; in fact, the game prominently features messages left between players and players "invading" each other. The game is chock-full of violence, and it seems to want to punish its players (it even makes us enjoy being punished by it). Some of the game's main themes are civilizational collapse and vengeful deities. Would it not be reasonable to be worried that this game would take over the world, maybe spreading from computer to computer and improving itself, and then killing all humans? Many of the game's characters would be perfectly happy to kill all humans, often for obscure reasons.

Of course, this is a ridiculous argument. No-one believes that Elden Ring will kill us all. 

But if you believe in some version of the AI existential risk argument, why is your argument not then also ridiculous? Why can we laugh at the idea that Elden Ring will destroy us all, but should seriously consider that some other software - perhaps some distant relative of GPT-4, Stable Diffusion, or AlphaGo - might wipe us all out?

The intuitive response to this is that Elden Ring is "not AI". GPT-4, Stable Diffusion, and AlphaGo are all "AI". Therefore they are more dangerous. But "AI" is just the name for a field of researchers and the various algorithms they invent and papers and software they publish. We call the field AI because of a workshop in 1956, and because it's good PR. AI is not a thing, or a method, or even a unified body of knowledge. AI researchers that work on different methods or subfields might barely understand each other, making for awkward hallway conversations. If you want to be charitable, you could say that many - but not all - of the impressive AI systems in the last ten years are built around gradient descent. But gradient descent itself is just high-school mathematics that has been known for hundreds of years. The devil is really in the details here, and there are lots and lots of details. GPT-4, Stable Diffusion, and AlphaGo do not have much in common beyond the use of gradient descent. So saying that something is scary because it's "AI" says almost nothing.

(This is honestly a little bit hard to admit for AI researchers, because many of us entered the field because we wanted to create this mystical thing called artificial intelligence, but then we spend our careers largely hammering away at various details and niche applications. AI is a powerful motivating ideology. But I think it's time we confess to the mundane nature of what we actually do.)

Another potential response is that what we should be worried about systems that have goals, can modify themselves, and spread over the internet. But this is not true of any existing AI systems that I know of, at least not in any way that would not be true about Elden Ring. (Computer viruses can spread over the internet and modify themselves, but they have been around since the 1980s and nobody seems to worry very much about them.)

Here is where we must concede that we are not worried about any existing systems, but rather about future systems that are "intelligent" or even "generally intelligent". This would set them apart from Elden Ring, and arguably also from existing AI systems. A generally intelligent system could learn to improve itself, fool humans to let it out onto the internet, and then it would kill all humans because, well, that's the cool thing to do.

See what's happening here? We introduce the word "intelligence" and suddenly a whole lot of things follow.

But it's not clear that "intelligence" is a useful abstraction here. Ok, this an excessively diplomatic phrasing. What I meant to say is that intelligence is a weasel word that is interfering with our ability to reason about these matters. It seems to evoke a kind of mystic aura, where if someone/something is "intelligent" it is seen to have a whole lot of capabilities that we not have evidence for.

Intelligence can be usefully spoken about as something that pops up when we do a factor analysis of various cognitive tests, which we can measure with some reliability and which has correlations with e.g. performance at certain jobs and life expectancy (especially in the military). This is arguably (but weakly) related to how we use the same word to say things like "Alice is more intelligent than Bob" when we me mean that she says more clever things than he does. But outside a rather narrow human context, the word is ill-defined and ill-behaved.

This is perhaps seen most easily by comparing us humans with other denizens of our planet. We're smarter than the other animals, right? Turns out you can't even test this proposition in a fair and systematic view. It's true that we seem to be unmatched in our ability to express ourselves in compositional language. But certain corvids seem to outperform us in long-term location memory, chimps outperform us in some short-term memory tasks, many species outperform us for face recognition among their own species, and there are animals that outperform us for most sensory processing tasks that are not vision-based. And let's not even get started with comparing our motor skills with those of octopuses. The cognitive capacities of animals are best understood as scrappy adaptations for particular ecological niches, and the same goes for humans. There's no good reason to suppose that our intelligence should be overall superior or excessively general. Especially compared to other animals that live in a variety of environments, like rats or pigeons.

We can also try to imagine what intelligence significantly "higher" than a human would mean. Except... we can't, really. Think of the smartest human you know, and speed that person up so they think ten times faster, and give them ten times greater long-term memory. To the extent this thought experiment makes sense, we would have someone who would ace an IQ test and probably be a very good programmer. But it's not clear that there is anything qualitatively different there. Nothing that would permit this hypothetical person to e.g. take over the world and kill all humans. That's not how society works. (Think about the most powerful people on earth and whether they are also those that would score highest on an IQ test.)

It could also be pointed out that we already have computer software that outperforms us by far on various cognitive tasks, including calculating, counting, searching databases and various forms of text manipulation. In fact, we have had such software for many decades. That's why computers are so popular. Why do we not worry that calculating software will take over the world? In fact, back in 1950s, when computers were new, the ability to do basic symbol manipulation was called "intelligence" and people actually did worry that such machines might supersede humans. Turing himself was part of the debate, gently mocking those who believed that the computers would take over the world. These days, we've stopped worrying because we no longer think of simple calculation as "intelligence". Nobody worries that Excel will take over the world. Maybe because Excel actually has taken over the world by being installed on billions of computers, and that's fine with us.

Ergo, I believe that "intelligence" is a rather arbitrary collection of capabilities that has some predictive value for humans, but that the concept is largely meaningless outside of this very narrow context. Because of the inherent ambiguity of this concept, using it an argument is liable to derail that argument. Many of the arguments for why "AI" poses an existential risk are of the form: This system exhibits property A, and we think that property B might lead to danger for humanity; for brevity, we'll call both A and B "intelligence". 

If we ban the concepts "intelligence" and "artificial intelligence" (and near-synonyms like "cognitive powers"), the doomer argument (some technical system will self-improve and kill us all) becomes much harder to state. Because then, you have to get concrete about what kind of system would have these marvelous abilities and where they would come from. Which systems can self-improve, how, and how much? What does improvement mean here? Which systems can trick humans do what they want, and how do they get there? Which systems even "want" anything at all? Which systems could take over the world, how do they get that knowledge, and how is our society constructed so as to be so easily destroyed? The onus is on the person proposing a doomer argument to actually spell this out, without resorting to treacherous conceptual shortcuts. Yes, this is hard work, but extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.

Once you start investigating which systems have a trace of these abilities, you may find them almost completely lacking in systems that are called "AI". You could rig an LLM to train on its own output and in some sense "self-improve", but it's very unclear how far this improvement would take it and if it helps the LLM get better at anything to worry about. Meanwhile, regular computer viruses have been able to randomize parts of themselves to avoid detection for a long time now. You could claim that AlphaGo in some sense has an objective, but it's objective is very constrained and far from the real world (to win at Go). Meanwhile, how about whatever giant scheduling system FedEx or UPS uses? And you could worry about Bing or ChatGPT occasionally suggesting violence, but what about Elden Ring, which is full of violence and talk of the end of the world?

I have yet to see a doomer/x-risk argument that is even remotely persuasive, as they all tend to dissolve once you remove the fuzzy and ambiguous abstractions (AI, intelligence, cognitive powers etc) that they rely on. I highly doubt such an argument can be made while referring only to concrete capabilities observed in actual software. One could perhaps make a logically coherent doomer argument by simply positing various properties of a hypothetical superintelligent entity. (This is similar to ontological arguments for the existence of god.) But this hypothetical entity would have nothing in common with software that actually exists and may not be realizable in the real world. It would be about equally far from existing "AI" as from Excel or Elden Ring.

This does not mean that we should not investigate the effects various new technologies have on society. LLMs like GPT-4 are quite amazing, and will likely affect most of us in many ways; maybe multimodal models will be at the core of complex software system in the future, adding layers of useful functionality to everything. It may also require us to find new societal and psychological mechanisms to deal with impersonated identities, insidious biases, and widespread machine bullshitting. These are important tasks and a crucial conversation to have, but the doomer discourse is unfortunately sucking much of the oxygen out of the room at the moment and risks tainting serious discussion about societal impact of this exciting new technology.

In the meantime, if you need some doom and gloom, I recommend playing Elden Ring. It really is an exceptional game. You'll get all the punishment you need and deserve as you die again and again at the hands/claws/tentacles of morbid monstrosities. The sense of apocalypse is ubiquitous, and the deranged utterances of seers, demigods, and cultists will satisfy your cravings for psychological darkness. By all means, allow yourself to sink into this comfortable and highly enjoyable nightmare for a while. Just remember that Morgott and Malenia will not kill you in real life. It is all a game, and you can turn it off when you want to.

The Cult of Gai

Imagine a religion that believes that one day, soon, the deity "Gai" will appear. This deity (demon?) will destroy all humanity. They are then obsessed with how to stop this happening. Can Gai be controlled? Contained? Can we make it like us? Won't work. Gai is just too smart.

Therefore, the religion devolves into a millenarian cult. Its charismatic leader says that humanity will cease to exist with >99% probability.

People outside this cult may wonder how they are so certain that Gai will appear, and what its attributes are. Followers of the religion point out that this is obvious from the way society is going, and in particular the technology that is invented.

The omens are everywhere. You can see the shape of Gai in this technology. This other technology bears the unmissable marks of Gai. It is unnatural, decadent, and we should stop developing the technology but we cannot because society is so sick. Maybe we deserve Gai's wrath.

But what will Gai look like? What will it want, or like? We cannot imagine this because we are so limited. The only thing we know is that Gai is smarter than any of us could ever be, and will teach itself to be even smarter.

You can tell adherents of this cult that all the other millenarian cults have been wrong so far, and their deities have failed to show up. You can tell them that all their sophisticated arguments only made sense to people who already believed. But that won't convince them.

You can tell them that the deities of the other cults look suspiciously like products of their time and obsessions (warrior gods, fertility gods, justice gods etc), and this cult's deity is Gai only because they as a culture idolize smartness. That won't move them.

In the end, all you can do is to try to prevent that more young souls are swallowed by the cult. And perhaps quietly lament that so many humans seek the bizarre solace of belief in vengeful gods and the end of the world.

Apology for Video Games Research

I just finished reading this excellent history of early digital computing, disguised as a biography of computing researcher and visionary J. C. R. Licklider. One of the things that the book drove home was the pushback, skepticism, and even hostility you faced if you wanted to work on things such as interactive graphics, networking, or time-sharing in the early decades of digital computers. In the fifties, sixties, and even seventies, the mainstream opinion was that computers were equipment for serious data processing and nothing else. Computers should be relatively few (maybe one per company or department), manned by professional computer operators, and work on serious tasks such as payrolls, nuclear explosion simulations, or financial forecasting. Computing should happen in batch mode, and interactive interfaces and graphical output were frivolities and at best a distraction.

In such an environment, Licklider had the audacity to believe in a future of interconnected personal computers with interactive, easy-to-use graphical interfaces and fingertip access to the world's knowledge as well as to your friends and colleagues. He wrote about this in 1960. Through enthusiasm, smart maneuvering, and happenstance he got to lead his own research group on these topics. But more importantly, he became a program manager at the organization that would become DARPA, and not only directed tons of money into this vision of the future but also catalyzed the formation of a research community on interactive, networked computing. The impact was enormous. Indirectly, Licklider is one of the key people in creating the type of computing that permeates our entire society.

When I go out and talk about artificial intelligence and games, I often make the point that games were important to AI research since the very beginning. And that's true if we talk about classical board games such as Chess and Checkers. Turing, von Neumann, and McCarthy all worked on Chess, because it was seen as a task that required real intelligence to do well at. It was also easy to simulate, and perhaps most importantly, it was respectable. Important people had been playing Chess for millennia, and talked about the intellectual challenges of the game. And so, Chess was important in AI research for 50 years or so, leading to lots of algorithmic innovations, until we sucked that game dry.

Video games are apparently a completely different matter. It's a new form of media, invented only in the seventies (if you don't count Spacewar! from 1962), and from the beginning associated with pale teenagers in their parents' basements and rowdy kids wasting time and money at arcade halls. Early video games had such simple graphics that you couldn't see what you were doing, later the graphics got better, and you could see that what you were doing was often shockingly violent (on the other hand, Chess is arguably a very low-fidelity representation of violence). Clearly, video games are not respectable.

I started doing research using video games as AI testbeds in 2004. The first paper from my PhD concerned using a weight-sharing neural architecture in a simple arcade game, and the second paper was about evolving neural networks to play a racing game. That paper ended up winning a best paper award at a large evolutionary computation conference. The reactions I got to this were... mixed. Many people felt that while my paper was fun, the award should have gone to "serious" research instead. Throughout the following years, I often encountered the explicit or implicit question about whether I was going to start doing serious research soon. Something more important, and respectable, than AI for video games. 

Gradually, as a healthy research community has formed around AI for video games, people have grudgingly had to admit that there might be something there after all. If nothing else, the game industry is economically important, and courses on games draw a lot of students. That DeepMind and OpenAI have (belatedly) started using games as testbeds has also helped with recognition. But still, I get asked what might happen if video games go away: will my research field disappear then? Maybe video games are just a fad? And if I want to do great things, why am I working on video games?

Dear reader, please imagine me not rolling my eyes at this point.

As you may imagine, during my career I've had to make the case for why video games research is worthwhile, important even, quite a few times. So here, I'll try to distill this into not-too-many words. And while I'm at it, I'd like to point out that the "apology" in the title of this text should be read more like Socrates' apology, as a forceful argument. I'm certainly not apologizing for engaging in video games research. For now, I will leave it unsaid whether I think anyone else ought to apologize for things they said about video games.

To begin with, video games are the dominant media of the generation that is in school now. Video games, for them, are not just a separate activity but an integrated part of social life, where Minecraft, Roblox, and Fortnite are both places to be, ways of communicating, and activities to do. Before that, two whole generations grew up playing video games to various extents. Now, studying the dominant media of today to try to understand it better would seem to be a worthwhile endeavor. Luckily, video games are eminently studiable. Modern games log all kinds of data with their developers, and it is also very easy to change the game for different players, creating different "experimental conditions". So, a perfect setting for both quantitative and qualitative research into how people actually behave in virtual worlds. While this ubiquitous data collection certainly has some nefarious applications, it also makes behavioral sciences at scale possible in ways that were never before.

People who don't play games much tend to underestimate the variety of game themes and mechanics out there. There are platform games (like Super Mario Bros), first-person shooters (like Call of Duty) and casual puzzle games (like Candy Crush)... is there anything else? Yes. For example, there are various role-playing games, dating simulators, flight simulators, racing games, team-based tactics games, turn-based strategy games, collectible card games, games where you open boxes, arrange boxes, build things out of boxes, and there's of course boxing games. I'm not going to continue listing game genres here, you get the point. My guess is that the variety of activities you can undertake in video games is probably larger than it is in most people's lives.

To me, it sounds ridiculous to suggest that video games would some day "go away" because we got tired of them or something. But it is very possible that in a decade or two, we don't talk much about video games. Not because they will have become less popular, but because they will have suffused into everything else. The diversity of video games may be so great that it might make no sense to refer to them as a single concept (this may already be the case). Maybe all kinds of activities and items will come with a digitally simulated version, which will in some way be like video games. In either case, it will all in some  ways have developed from design, technology, and conventions that already exist.

In general, it's true that video games are modeled on the "real world". Almost every video game includes activities or themes that are taken from, or at least inspired by, the physical world we interact with. But it's also increasingly true that the real world is modeled on video games. Generations of people have spent large amounts of their time in video games, and have learned and come to expect certain standards for interaction and information representation; it is no wonder that when we build new layers of our shared social and technical world, we use conventions and ideas from video games. This runs the gamut from "gamification", which in its simplest form is basically adding reward mechanics to everything, to ways of telling stories, controlling vehicles, displaying data, and teaching skills. So, understanding how video games work and how people live in them is increasingly relevant to understanding how people live in the world in general.

The world of tomorrow will build not only on the design and conventions of video games, but also on their technology. More and more things will happen in 3D worlds, including simulating and testing new designs and demonstrating new products to consumers. We will get used to interacting with washing machines, libraries, highway intersections, parks, cafés and so on in virtual form before we interact with them in the flesh, and sometimes before they exist in the physical world. This is also how we will be trained on new technology and procedures. By far the best technology for such simulations, with an unassailable lead because of their wide deployment, is game engines. Hence, contributing to technology for games means contributing to technology that will be ubiquitous soon.

Now, let's talk about AI again. I brand myself an "AI and games researcher", which is convenient because the AI people have a little box to put me in, with the understanding that this is not really part of mainstream AI. Instead, it's a somewhat niche application. In my mind, of course, video games are anything but niche to AI. Video games are fully-fledged environments, complete with rewards and similar incentives, where neural networks and their friends can learn to behave. Games are really unparalleled as AI problems/environments, because not only do we have so many different games that contain tasks that are relevant for humans, but these games are also designed to gradually teach humans to play them. If humans can learn, so should AI agents. Other advantages include fast simulation time, unified interfaces, and huge amounts of data from human players that can be learned from. You could even say that video games are all AI needs, assuming we go beyond the shockingly narrow list of games that are commonly used as testbeds and embrace the weird and wonderful world of video games in its remarkable diversity.

AI in video games is not only about playing them. Equally importantly, we can use AI to understand players and to learn to design games and the content inside them. Both of these applications of AI can improve video games, and the things that video games will evolve into. Generating new video game content may also be crucial to help develop AI agents with more general skills, and understanding players means understanding humans.

It is true that some people insist that AI should "move on" from games to "real" problems. However, as I've argued above, the real world is about to become more like video games, and build more on video game technology. The real world comes to video games as much as video games come to the real world.

After reading this far, you might understand why I found reading about Licklider's life so inspirational. He was living in the future, while surrounded by people who were either uninterested or dismissive, but luckily also by some who shared the vision. This was pretty much how I felt maybe 15 years ago. These days, I feel that I'm living in the present, with a vision that many younger researchers nod approvingly to. Unfortunately, many of those who hold power over research funding and appointments have not really gotten the message. Probably because they belong to the shrinking minority (in rich countries) who never play video games.

I'd like to prudently point out that I am not comparing myself with Licklider in terms of impact or intellect, though I would love to one day get there. But his example resonated with me. And since we're talking about Licklider, one of his main contributions was building a research community around interactive and networked computing using defense money. For people who work on video games research and are used to constantly disguising our projects as being about something else, it would be very nice to actually have access to funding. Following the reasoning above, I think it would be well-invested money. If you are reading this and are someone with power over funding decisions, please consider this a plea.

If you are a junior researcher interested in video games research and face the problem that people with power over your career don't believe in your field, you may want to send them this text. Maybe it'll win them over. Or maybe they'll think that I am a total crackpot and wonder how I ever got a faculty job at a prestigious university, which is good for you because you can blame me for the bad influence. I don't care, I have tenure. Finally, next time someone asks you why video games research is important, try turning it around. Video games are central to our future in so many ways, so if your research has no bearing on video games, how is your research relevant for the world of tomorrow?

Note: Throughout this text I have avoided using the term "metaverse" because I don't know what it means and neither do you.

Thanks to Aaron Dharna, Sam Earle, Mike Green, Ahmed Khalifa, Raz Saremi, and Graham Todd for feedback on a draft version of this post.

Brief statement of research vision

I thought I would try to very briefly state the research vision that has in some incarnation animated me since I started doing research almost twenty years ago. Obviously, this could take forever and hundreds of pages. But I had some good wine and need to go to bed soon, so I'll try to finish this and post before I fall asleep, thus keeping it short. No editing, just the raw thoughts. Max one page.

The objective is to create more general artificial intelligence. I'm not saying general intelligence, because I don't think truly general intelligence - the ability to solve any solvable task - could exist. I'm just saying considerably more general artificial intelligence than what we have now, in the sense that the same artificial system could do a large variety of different cognitive-seeming things.

The way to get there is to train sets of diverse-but-related agents in persistent generative virtual worlds. Training agents to play particular video games is all good, but we need more than one game, we need lots of different games with lots of different versions of each. Therefore, we need to generate these worlds, complete with rules and environments. This generative process needs to be sensitive to the capabilities and needs/interests of the agents, in the sense that it generates the content that will best help the agents to develop.

The agents will need to be trained over multiple timescales, both faster "individual" timescales and slower "evolutionary" timescales; perhaps we will need many more different timescales. Different learning algorithms might be deployed at different timescales, perhaps with gradient descent for the lifetime learning and evolution at longer timescales. The agents need to be diverse - without diversity we will collapse to learning a single thing - but they will also need to build on shared capabilities. A quality-diversity evolutionary process might provide the right framework for this.

Of course, drawing a sharp line between agents and environments is arbitrary and probably a dead end at some point. In the natural world, the environments largely consists of other agents, or is created by other agents, of the same species or others. Therefore, the environment and rule generation processes should also be agential, and subject to the same constraints and rewards; ideally, there is no difference between "playing" agents and "generating" agents.

Human involvement could and probably should happen at any stage. This system should be able to identify challenges and deliver them to humans, for example to navigate around a particular obstacle, devise a problem that a particular agent can't solve, and things like that. These challenges could be delivered to humans at a massively distributed scale in a way that provides a game-like experience for human participants, allowing them to inject new ideas into the process where the process needs it most and "anchoring" the developing intelligence in human capabilities. The system might model humans' interests and skills to select the most appropriate human participants to present certain challenges to.

Basically, we are talking about a giant, extremely diverse video game-like virtual world with enormous agent diversity constantly creating itself in a process where algorithms collaborate with humans, creating the ferment from which more general intelligence can evolve. This is important because current agential AI is held back by the tasks and environments we present it with far more than by architectures and learning algorithms.

Of course, I phrase this as a project where the objective is to develop artificial intelligence. But you could just as well turn it around, and see it as a system that creates interesting experiences to humans. AI for games rather than games for AI. Two sides of the same coin etc. Often, the "scientific objective" of a project is a convenient lie; you develop interesting technology and see where it leads.

I find it fascinating to think about how much of this plan has been there for almost twenty years. Obviously, I've been influenced by what other people think and do research-wise, or at least I really hope so. But I do think the general ideas have more or less been there since the start. And many (most?) of the 300 or so papers that have my name on them (usually with the hard work done by my students and/or colleagues) are in some way related to this overall vision.

The research vision I'm presenting here is certainly way more mainstream now than it was a decade or two ago; many of the ideas now fall under the moniker "open-ended learning". I believe that almost any idea worth exploring is more or less independently rediscovered by many people, and that there comes a time for every good idea when the idea is "in the air" and becomes obvious to everyone in the field. I hope this happens to the vision laid out above, because it means that more of this vision gets realized. But while I'm excited for this, it would also mean that I would have to actively go out and look for a new research vision. This might mean freedom and/or stagnation.

Anyway, I'm falling asleep. Time to hit publish and go to bed.

We tried learning AI from games. How about learning from players?

Aren't we done with games yet? Some would say that while games were useful for AI research for a while, our algorithms have mastered them now and it is time to move to real problems in the real world. I say that AI has barely gotten started with games, and we are more likely to be done with the real world before we are done with games.

I'm sure you think you've heard this one before. Both reinforcement learning and tree search largely developed in the context of board games. Adversarial tree search took big steps forward because we wanted our programs to play Chess better, and for more than a decade, TD-Gammon, Tesauro's 1992 Backgammon player, was the only good example of reinforcement learning being good at something. Later on, the game of Go catalyzed development of Monte Carlo Tree Search. A little later still, simple video games like those made for the old Atari VCS helped us make reinforcement learning work with deep networks. By pushing those methods hard and sacrificing immense amounts of compute to the almighty Gradient we could teach these networks to play really complex games such as DoTA and StarCraft. But then it turns out that networks trained to play a video game aren't necessarily any good at doing any tasks that are not playing video games. Even worse, they aren't even any good at playing another video game, or another level of the same game, or the same level of the same game with slight visual distortions. Sad, really. A bunch of ideas have been proposed for how to improve this situation, but progress is slow going. And that's where we are.

A Wolf Made from Spaghetti, as generated by the Midjourney diffusion model. All images in this blog post were generated by Midjourney using prompts relevant to the text.

As I said, that's not the story I'm going to tell here. I've told it before, at length. Also, I just told it, briefly, above.

It's not controversial to say that the most impressive results in AI from the last few years have not come from reinforcement learning or tree search. Instead, they have come from self-supervised learning. Large language models, which are trained to do something as simple as predicting the next word (okay, technically the next token) given some text, have proven to be incredibly capable. Not only can they write prose in a wide variety of different styles, but also answer factual questions, translate between languages, impersonate your imaginary childhood friends and many other things they were absolutely not trained for. It's quite amazing really, and we're not really sure what's going on more than that the Gradient and the Data did it. Of course, learning to predict the next word is an idea that goes back at least to Shannon in the 1940s, but what changed was scale: more data, more compute, and bigger and better networks. In a parallel development, unsupervised learning on images has advanced from barely being able to generate generic, blurry faces to creating high-quality high-resolution illustrations of arbitrary prompts in arbitrary styles. Most people could not produce a photorealistic picture of a wolf made from spaghetti, but DALL-E 2 presumably could. A big part of this is the progression in methods from autoencoders to GANs to diffusion models, but an arguably more important reason for this progress is the use of slightly obscene amounts of data and compute.

As impressive as progress in language and image generation is, these modalities are not grounded in actions in a world. We describe the words, and we do things with words. (I take an action when I ask you to pass me the sugar, and you react to this, for example by passing the sugar.) Still, GPT-3 and its ilk do not have a way to relate what it says to actions and their consequences in the world. In fact, it does not really have a way of relating to the world at all, instead it says things that "sound good" (are probable next words). If what a language model says happens to be factually true about the world, that's a side effect of its aesthetics (likelihood estimates). And to say that current language models are fuzzy about the truth is a bit of an understatement; recently I asked GPT-3 to generate biographies of me, and they are typically a mix of some verifiably true statements ("Togelius is a leading game AI researcher") with plenty of plausible-sounding but untrue statements such as that I'm born in 1981 or that I'm a professor at the University of Sussex. Some of these false statements are flattering, such as that I invented AlphaGo, others less flattering, such as that I'm from Stockholm.

We have come to the point in any self-respecting blog post about AI where we ask what intelligence is, really. And really, it is about being an agent that acts in a world of some kind. The more intelligent the agent is, the more "successful" or "adaptive" or something like that the acting should be, relative to a world or a set of environments in a world.

Now, language models like GPT-3 and image generators like DALL-E 2 are not agents in any meaningful sense of the word. They did not learn in a world; they have no environments they are adapted to. Sure, you can twist the definition of agent and environment to say that GPT-3 acts when it produces text and its environment is the training algorithm and data. But the words it produces do not have meaning in that "world". A pure language model never has to learn what its words mean because it never acts or observes consequences in the world from which those words derive meaning. GPT-3 can't help lying because it has no skin in the game. I have no worries about a language model or an image generator taking over the world, because they don't know how to do anything.

Let's go back to talking about games. (I say this often.) Sure, tree search poses unreasonable demands on its environments (fast forward models), and reinforcement learning is awfully inefficient and has a terrible tendency to overfit, so that after spending huge compute resources you end up with a clever but oh so brittle model. For some types of games, reinforcement learning has not been demonstrated to work at all. Imagine training a language model like GPT-3 with reinforcement learning and some kind of text quality-based reward function; it would be possible, but I'll see you in 2146 when it finishes training.

But what games have got going for them is that they are about taking actions in a world and learning from the effects of the actions. Not necessarily the same world that we live most of our lives in, but often something close to that, and always a world that makes sense for us (because the games are made for us to play). Also, there is an enormous variety among those worlds, and the environments within them. If you think that all games are arcade games from the eighties or first-person shooters where you fight demons, you need to educate yourself. Preferably by playing more games. There are games (or whatever you want to call them, interactive experiences?) where you run farms, plot romantic intrigues, unpack boxes to learn about someone's life, cook food, build empires, dance, take a hike, or work in pizza parlors. Just to take some examples from the top of my head. Think of an activity that humans do with some regularity, and I'm pretty certain that someone has made a game that represents this activity at some level of abstraction. And in fact, there are lots of activities and situations in games that do not exist (or are very rare) in the real world. As more of our lives move into virtual domains, the affordances and intricacies of these worlds will only multiply. The ingenious mechanism that creates more relevant worlds to learn to act in is the creativity of human game designers; because originality is rewarded (at least in some game design communities) designers compete to come up with new situations and procedures to make games out of.

Awesome. Now, how could we use this immense variety of worlds, environments, and tasks to learn more general intelligence that is truly agentic? If tree search and reinforcement learning are not enough to do this on their own, is there a way we could leverage the power of unsupervised learning on massive datasets for this?

Yes, there is. But this requires a shift in mindset: we are going to learn as-general-as-we-can artificial intelligence not only from games, but also from gamers. Because while there are many games out there, there are even more gamers. Billions of them, in fact. My proposition here is simple: train enormous neural networks to learn to predict the next action given an observation of a game state (or perhaps a sequence of several previous game states). This is essentially what the player is doing when watching the screen of a game and manipulating a controller, mouse or keyboard to play it. It is also a close analogue of training a large language model on a vast variety of different types of human-written text. And while the state observation from most games is largely visual, we know from GANs and diffusion models that self-supervised learning can work very effectively on image data.

So, if we manage to train deep learning models that take descriptions of game states as inputs and produce actions as output (analogously to a model that takes a text as input and produces a new word, or takes an image as input and produces a description), what does this get us? To paraphrase a famous philosopher, the foundation models have described the world, but the behavior foundation models will change it. The output will actually be actions situated in a world of sorts, which is something very different than text and images.

I don't want to give the impression that I believe that this would "solve intelligence"; intelligence is not that kind of "problem". But I do believe that behavior foundation models trained on a large variety (and volume) of gameplay traces would help us learn much about intelligence, in particular if we see intelligence as adaptive behavior. It would also almost certainly give us models that would be useful for robotics and all kinds of other tasks that involve controlling embodied agents including, of course, video games.

I think the main reason that this has not already been done is that the people who would do it don't have access to the data. Most modern video games "phone home" to some extent, meaning that they send data about their players to the developers. This data  is mostly used to understand how their games are played, as well as balancing and bug fixing. The extent and nature of this data varies widely, with some games mostly sending session information (when did you start and finish playing, which levels did you play) and others sending much more detailed data. It is probably very rare to log data at the level of detail we would need to train foundation models of behavior, but certainly possible and almost certainly already done by some game. The problem is that game development companies tend to be extremely protective about this data, as they see it as business critical.

There are some datasets available out there to start with, for example one used to learn from demonstrations in CounterStrike (CS:GO). Other efforts, including some I've been involved in myself, used much less data. However, to train these models properly, you would probably need very large amounts of data from many different games. We would need a Common Crawl or at least an ImageNet of game behavior. (There is a Game Trace Archive, which could be seen as a first step.)

There are many other things that need to be worked out as well. What are the inputs - pixels, or something more clever? And output also differs somewhat between games (except for consoles, which use standardized controllers and conventions) - should there be some intermediate representations? How frequent does the data capture need to be? And, of course, there's the question of what kind of neural architecture would best support these kinds of models.

Depending on how you plan to use these models, there are some ethical considerations. One is that we would be building on lots of information that players are giving by playing games. This is of course already happening, but most people are not aware that some real-world characteristics of people are predictable from playtraces. As the behavior exhibited by trained models would not be any particular person's playstyle, and we are not interested in identifiable behavior, this may be less of a concern. Another thing to think about is what kind of behavior these models will learn from game traces, given that the default verb in many games is "shoot". And while a large portion of the world's population play video games, the demographics is still skewed. It will be interesting to study what the equivalent of conditional inputs or prompting will be for foundation models of behavior, allowing us to control the output of these models.

Personally, I think this is the most promising road not yet taken to more general AI. I'm ready to get started. Both in my academic role as head of the NYU Game Innovation Lab, and in my role as research director at our game AI startup modl.ai, where we plan to use foundation models to enable game agents and game testing among other things. If anyone reading this has a large dataset of game behavior and wants to collaborate, please shoot me an email! Or, if you have a game with players and want modl.ai to help you instrument it to collect data to build such models (which you could use), we're all ears!

PS. Yesterday, as I was revising this blog post, DeepMind released Gato, a huge transformer network that (among many other things) can play a variety of Atari games based on training on thousands of playtraces. My first thought was "damn, they already did more or less what I was planning to do!". But, impressive as the results are, that agent is still trained on relatively few playtraces from a handful of dissimilar games of limited complexity. There are many games in the world that have millions of daily players, and there are millions of games available across the major app stores. Atari VCS games are some of the simplest video games there are, both in terms of visual representation and mechanical and strategic complexity. So, while Gato is a welcome step forward, the real work is ahead of us!

Thanks to those who read a draft of this post and helped improve it: M Charity, Aaron Dharna, Sam Earle, Maria Edwards, Michael Green, Christoffer Holmgård, Ahmed Khalifa, Sebastian Risi, Graham Todd, Georgios Yannakakis.

Rethinking large conferences

As the end of the pandemic draws near, one of the many things I am excited about is to be able to go to physical conferences again. A year of virtual conferences have shown us that videoconferencing is in no way a viable replacement for a real conference; at best it's a complement. I am extremely excited to go and meet my friends and colleagues from all over the world and exchange ideas and experience, but I am perhaps even more excited to be able to introduce a new generation of PhD students to their academic community, see them make friends and brainstorm the ideas that will fuel the next wave of scientific advances. It is mainly for their sake that I hope some in-person events may happen already this year; it's heartbreaking to see a generation of junior researchers being deprived of their opportunities for networking and professional and social growth for any longer.

However, I'm only looking forward to going to the smaller, specialized conferences. In my field (AI and Games), that would be such conferences as FDG, IEEE CoG, and AIIDE. I am not really looking forward to the large, "prestigious" conferences such as AAAI, IJCAI, and NeurIPS. In fact, if I had to choose (and did not worry about the career prospects of my students), I would only go to the smaller gatherings.

Why? Largely because I find the big conferences boring. There's just not much there for me. In a large and diverse field such as artificial intelligence, the vast majority of paper presentations are just not relevant for any given attendee. If I drop into a paper session at random (on, say, constraint satisfaction or machine translation or game theory or something else I'm not working on), there's probably around 20% chance I even understand what's going on, and 10% chance I find it interesting. Sure, I might be less clever than the average AI researcher, but I seriously doubt any single attendee really cares about more than a small majority of the sessions at a conference such as AAAI.

This could to some extent have been remedied if the presentations were made so as to be understood by a broader audience. And I don't mean "broader audience" as in "your parents", but as in "other AI researchers". (Apologies if your parents are AI researchers. It must be rough.) However, that's not how this works. These conglomerate conferences are supposed to be the top venues for technical work in each sub-field, so presenters are mostly addressing the 3% of conference attendees that work on the same topic. Of course, it does not help that AI researchers are generally NOT GOOD at giving talks about their work, and are not incentivized to get better. The game is all about getting into these conferences, not about presenting the work once you were accepted to present it.

Ah yes, this brings us to the topic of acceptance rates. I have long objected to selective conferences. Basically, the top venues in various computer science domains are not only big but also accept a very small percentage of submitted papers. Typically 20% or even less. This was once motivated by the constraints of the venue - there supposedly wasn't space for more presentations. While this was always a questionable excuse, the fact that conferences keep their low acceptance rates even while going virtual (!) shows without any shade of doubt that it is all about the prestige. Hiring, tenure, and promotion committees, particularly in the US, count publications in "top" conferences as a proxy for research quality.

I get the need for proxies when evaluating someone for hiring or promotion because actually understanding someone else's research deeply, unless they're working on exactly the same thing as you, is really hard. Still, we need to stop relying on selective conference publications to judge research quality, because (1)  acceptance into a selective conference does not say much about research quality, (2) the selectiveness makes these conferences worse as conferences. First things first. Why is acceptance into a selective conference not a good signal of research quality? Those of us who have been involved in the process in different roles (author, reviewer, meta-reviewer, area chair etc) over a number of years have plenty of war stories about how random this process can be. Reviewers may be inexperienced, paper matching may be bad, and above all there's a mindset that we are mostly looking for reasons to reject papers. If a paper looks different or smells off, a reason will be found to reject it. (Yes, reader, I see that you are right now reminded about your own unfair rejections.) But we don't have to rely on anecdotes. There's data. Perhaps the largest study on this showed that decisions were 60% arbitrary. Since this experiment was done in 2014, remarkably little has changed in the process. It sometimes seems that computer scientists suffer from a kind of self-inflicted Stockholm syndrome: the system we built for ourselves sucks, but it's our system so we will defend it.

I personally think that what is actually being selected for is partly familiarity: a paper has a better chance of getting in if it looks more or less like what you expect a paper in the field to look like. This means a certain conservatism in form, or even selection for mediocrity. Papers at large conferences are simply more boring. Usually, I find the more interesting and inspiring papers at smaller conferences and workshops than in the corresponding topical sessions at large conferences. I don't have any data to back this up, but the fact that program chairs often urge their reviewers to accept novel and "high-risk" papers point to that they perceive this phenomenon as well. If the most interesting papers were actually accepted, we would not be hearing such things.

Another perspective on low acceptance rates is the following: If a competent researcher has done sound research and written it up in a readable paper, they should not have to worry about getting it published. If the research is not wrong and is a contribution of some sort it should get published, right? It's not like we are running out of pixels to view the papers. No-one benefits from good research not being published. However, in the current state of things, even the best researchers submit work they know is good with the knowledge that there's a good chance it might not get accepted because someone somewhere disliked it or didn't get it. Pretty bizarre when you think about it. Is computer science full of masochists, or why do we do this to ourselves? The emergence of a preprint-first practice, where papers are put on arXiv before or at the same time as they are submitted for review, has helped the matter somewhat by making research more easily accessible, but is perversely also used as an excuse for not dealing with the low acceptance rate problem in the first place.

Back to the conference itself. Ignoring that most papers are uninteresting to most attendees, maybe these large conferences are great for networking? Yes, if you already know everyone. For someone like me, who has been in AI long enough to have drunk beer with authors of many of my favorite papers, AAAI and NeurIPS are opportunities for serial hangovers. For someone new to the community, it certainly seems that a smaller conference where people may actually notice you standing alone by the wall and go up and talk to you would be a much better opportunity to get to know people. Basically, a conference with thousands of attendees does not provide community.

So who, or what, are large conferences for? I honestly do not see a reason for their existence as they currently function. As covid has forced all conferences to go temporarily virtual, maybe we should consider only bringing back the smaller and more specialized conferences? If some imaginary Federal Trade Commission of Science decided to break up every conference with more than 500 attendees, like it was Standard Oil or AT&T, I don't think we would miss much.

But wait. Isn't there a role for a large gathering of people where you could go to learn what happens outside your own narrow domain, absorb ideas from other subfields, and find new collaborators with diverse expertise? I think there is. Current large conferences don't really provide that function very well, because of what gets presented and how it gets presented (as stated above). So I do think there should be something like broad conferences where you could find out what's going in all of AI. But you should not be able to submit papers to such a conference. Instead, you would need to submit your paper to a smaller, more permissive conference for your particular subfield. After the papers are presented at the smaller conference, the organizers and/or audience choose a subset of authors of the most notable papers to go present their papers at the large conference. But that presentation must be explicitly target people outside of their technical subfield. In other words, if I was to present our new work on procedural content generation through reinforcement learning, I would have to present it so that folks working in constraint satisfaction, learning theory, and machine translation all understood it and got something out of it. And I would expect the same of their presentations. This would mean presenting in a very different way than we usually present at a conference. But it would make for a large conference I would want to go to.