New test reveals AI still lacks common sense

Natural language processing (NLP) has taken great strides recently--but how much does AI understand of what it reads? Less than we thought, according to researchers at USC's Department of Computer Science. In a recent paper Assistant Professor Xiang Ren and Ph.D. student Yuchen Lin found that despite advances, AI still doesn't have the common sense needed to generate plausible sentences. "Current machine text-generation models can write an article that may be convincing to many humans, but they're basically mimicking what they have seen in the training phase," said Lin. "Our goal in this paper is to study the problem of whether current state-of-the-art text-generation models can write sentences to describe natural scenarios in our everyday lives." Specifically, Ren and Lin tested the models' ability to reason and showed there is a large gap between current text generation models and human performance.