'The discourse is unhinged': how the media gets AI alarmingly wrong

In June of last year, five researchers at Facebook's Artificial Intelligence Research unit published an article showing how chatbots can simulate negotiation-like conversations. They also showed that the chatbots sometimes talked with each other in a non-standard form of English they seemed to have invented. The media jumped on this and started likening the event to the rise of Skynet in the Terminator movie. Zachary Lipton, an assistant professor at the machine learning department at Carnegie Mellon University, watched with frustration as this story transformed from “interesting-ish research” to “sensationalized crap”. The Guardian has an interesting article on how AI is commonly reported.