Some thoughts about artificial stupidity and artificial dumbness

Jean Lieber (1) , Jean-Guy Mailly (2, 3) , Pierre Marquis (4) , Henri Prade (5, 6, 7) , François Rollin (8)

1 Data Science, Knowledge, Reasoning and Engineering - K team
2 LIPADE (URP_2517) - Laboratoire d'Informatique Paris Descartes
3 UPCité - Université Paris Cité
4 CRIL - Centre de Recherche en Informatique de Lens
5 IRIT - Institut de recherche en informatique de Toulouse
6 IRIT-ADRIA - Argumentation, Décision, Raisonnement, Incertitude et Apprentissage
7 CNRS - Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique
8 Rollmops Unlimited Foolishness

In a recently published book, the French writer and comedian François Rollin has discussed various aspects of the notion of stupidity, including artificial stupidity, the stupid counterpart of artificial intelligence. His claim is that a system of artificial stupidity is a system that provides wrong answers to any task it should solve, leading to absurd solutions in most cases. We believe that this claim is (at least partially) false and that designing artificial stupidity is not as trivial as it seems. In this article, we discuss why and how one could design a system of artificial stupidity. We believe that such a reflection on (artificial) stupidity can bring about some interesting insights about (artificial) intelligence.

Keywords: artificial stupidity; artificial intelligence

Domains: Computer Science [cs]; Artificial Intelligence [cs.AI]

Jean Lieber, Jean-Guy Mailly, Pierre Marquis, Henri Prade, François Rollin. Some thoughts about artificial stupidity and artificial dumbness. AI Communications, 2023, 2023 (pre-press), pp.1--15. ⟨10.3233/AIC-220322⟩. ⟨hal-04455911⟩