AI has become increasingly intertwined with our daily lives thanks to virtual assistants like Alexa, Google Assistant, and Siri. Recently, however, we’ve been seeing innovative new AI iterations with the likes of DALL-E magically using AI to turn text prompts into images and increasingly impressive translation capabilities becoming available. Following this trend, Meta has now made available the third iteration of its AI chatbot, BlenderBot and is asking the public to help train it up.
Meta’s chatbot has had a checkered past with BlenderBot and BlenderBot 2 often exhibiting troublesome opinions. This has been the case for most AI chatbots, with Microsoft’s Tay famously having to be taken offline less than a day after it was made available because it was tweeting out hate-filled and bigoted nonsense. Meta is hoping BlenderBot 3 will be different.
The reason for the troubled past that comes with AI chatbots is the data they are trained on. As they learn from the conversations they have with human users, these naïve AIs can quickly pick up on whatever nonsense people say to them. Meta has tried to address this with BlenderBot 3 by ensuring that it won’t simply repeat what it has heard other users saying. Meta is training BlenderBot 3 with data from researchers, as well as giving it the opportunity to use the internet to find answers to questions that it didn’t know before.
BlenderBot 3 is now available for users in the US to try out. You simply have to go to this website, and you can start using the chatbot like you would use a search engine. Unfortunately, there doesn’t seem to be any way around the geolocation block either with popular and reputable VPNs not able to break through it. If you live elsewhere in the world, you will just have to wait before you can give it a try.
Meta is also asking the public to help train up BlenderBot 3 by giving feedback to the developers on how successful BlenderBot 3 is working. They are asking users to give them access to their usage data, which will help them better assess BlenderBot 3’s responses to the queries it receives.
In other AI news, the AI text-to-image tool DALL-E is opening up availability to another 1 million users.
Image via: Facebook
