AI That Sort of, Kind of Did Not Work: Useful Reminders
April 24, 2023
Note: This essay is the work of a real and still-alive dinobaby. No smart software involved, just a dumb humanoid.
I read “Epic AI Fails. A List of Failed Machine Learning Projects.” My hunch is that a write up suggesting that smart software may disappoint in some cases is not going to be a popular topics. I can hear the pooh-poohs now: “The examples used older technology.” And “Our system has been engineered to avoid that problem.” And “Our Large Language Model uses synthetic data which improves performance and the value of system outputs.” And “We have developed a meta-layer of AI which integrates multiple systems in order to produce a more useful response.”
Did I omit any promises other than “The check is in the mail” or “Our customer support team will respond to your call immediately, 24×7, and with an engineer, not a smart chatbot because. Humans, you know.”
The main point of the article from Analytics India, an online publication, provides some color on interesting flops; specifically:
- Amazon’s recruitment system. Think discrimination against females. Amazon’s Rekognition system and its identification of elected officials as criminals. Wait. Maybe those IDs were accurate?
- Covid 19 models. Moving on.
- Google and the diabetic retinopathy detection system. The marketing sounded fine. Candy for breakfast? Sure, why not?
- OpenAI’s Samantha. Not as crazy as Microsoft Tay but in the ballpark.
- Microsoft Tay. Yeah, famous self instruction in near real time.
- Sentient Investment AI Hedge Fund. Your retirement savings? There are jobs at Wal-Mart I think.
- Watson. Wow. Cognitive computing and Jeopardy.
The author takes a less light-hearted approach than I. Useful list with helpful reminders that it is easier to write tweets and marketing collateral than deliver smart software that delivers on sales confections.
Stephen E Arnold, April 24, 2023
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