Artificial Intelligence: Oversold?
September 18, 2018
I read “Big Tech Is Overselling AI As the Solution to Online Extremism.” Phys.org strikes me as a semi-reliable outfit. I cannot, however, overlook the write up’s failure to define “extremism.” Physicists these days cannot define dark matter, so I suppose I will have to accept the non definition.
Assuming that one can define extremism, Phys.org is holding “big tech” to a higher standard than it holds physicists who disagree that the undefined dark matter does not exist. I know it is a lazy rhetorical trick, but these folks are physicists and deal with uncertainty, in theory at least, every day.
Nevertheless, I found this statement in the Phys.org article thought provoking:
In 2017, 250 companies suspended advertising contracts with Google over its alleged failure to moderate YouTube’s extremist content. A year later, Google’s senior vice president of advertising and commerce, Sridhar Ramaswamy, says the company is making strong progress in platform safety to regain the lost confidence of its clients. However, a recent study by the NGO Counter Extremism Project refutes the effectiveness of the company’s effort to limit and delete extremist videos. More transparency and accountability from YouTube is needed, given that the study found that over 90 per cent of ISIS videos were uploaded more than once, with no action taken against the accounts that violated the company’s terms of service.
What’s at fault? The Google type outfits which cannot get software to figure out human utterance in a way that nails extremism, which if not defined, can be a tough task. Or is the problem that smart software does not work as some big tech folks assert and dearly hope is correct?
My hunch is that artificial intelligence is the equivalent of a cowboy throwing sand in the eyes of the gun toting bad guy who wants to shoot the person in the white hat. Note: the hat is a real Western thing, not a beanie with a propeller like those I spotted in a 2016 video recently.
I know that tech yip yap with mouthfuls of jargon can send some intellectual blood hounds chasing chimera.
You decide. I think I smell a red herring.
Stephen E Arnold, September 18, 2018
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