Attackers can elicit 'toxic behavior' from AI translation systems, study finds

Neural machine translation (NMT), or AI techniques that can translate between languages, is in widespread use today owing to its robustness and versatility. But it's been shown that NMT systems can be manipulated if provided prompts containing certain words, phrases, or alphanumeric symbols. For example, in 2015, Google fixed a bug that caused Google Translate to offer homophobic slurs like "poof" and "queen" to those translating the word "gay" from English into Spanish, French, or Portuguese. In another glitch, Reddit users discovered that typing repeated words like "dog" into Translate and asking the system to translate into English yielded "doomsday predictions." A new study from researchers at the University of Melbourne, Facebook, Twitter, and Amazon suggests that NMT systems are even more vulnerable than previously believed.