Gremlins in the Cracks －隙間にいるグレムリンたちー

“Don’t ever feed him after midnight!” 

“If your air conditioner goes on the fritz, or your washing machine blows up, or your video recorder conks out; before you call the repair man, turn on all the lights, check all the closets and cupboards, look under all the beds, [because] you never can tell – there just might be a gremlin.”

Quotes from the 1984 movie, “Gremlin”

 

The more complicated that technology becomes, the more dark corners there are for bugs and flaws to hide in.  We should expect errors, and not blindly rely on complicated systems to work well without human supervision. 

A recent example is that Chat GPT’s developers have had to tweak its code in order to stop it slipping words such as “goblin” and “gremlin” into its answers.  Apparently, the makers tried to make the AI chatbot sound more nerdy, to make it more engaging.  This rewarded the chatbot for using quirky metaphors.  So it started talking about users avoiding goblins instead of avoiding difficulties, or removing gremlins instead of fixing problems.  Users complained and the company changed the code, to ban the use of monsters as metaphors. 

Another story I heard today about a naive over-reliance on AI algorithms came from Sweden.  A mother was shocked that her child was assigned a school that was very difficult to get to.  Talking with other parents, the mother found that the same thing had happened to many of their children.  Instead of being sent to the nearest school, they had to travel miles down river, cross a bridge, and come miles back up the other side of the river. 

Eventually, after hiring lawyers and fighting the local education board in court, they found that the board had started using an AI algorithm to assign students to the school nearest their house.  This improved efficiency for the education board, and let their staff work on other things.  But the algorithm didn’t take account of roads, rivers, bridges and so on.  It just assigned students to the nearest school as if the students were birds, and could fly over all roads and obstacles. 

We will have to get used to living with gremlins.  There are bound to be ever more of them living alongside us in the future.