When Profiling Goes Wrong

huskymo writes "This morning's Wall Street Journal is carrying a funny story on TiVo and Amazon's automatic customer profiling. As most Slashdot readers probably know, TiVo keeps track of which programs you record and--if you haven't told it not to--records other programs it thinks you'd like. The article describes users that TiVo's mistaken for Korean, for gay, even for "a pregnant gay man."" Funny as hell.

Comments

staying on the subject

[hashmap]

I found the TiVo recommendation service quite underwhelming.

It looks to me as if they simply look at the genre of the program you rate high and then take that to be your preference.

I found out that the hard way, one day I went home and I found the tivo filled with idiotic shows like: "Price is right" and "Spend $1000 in 1 minute", "Blind date" etc... upon investigating I realized that I've have rated "Junkyard Wars" (a competition of building things from junk) and "BattleBots" (remote controlled robot fight show) high the previous day, this triggered the game-show category to be recorded.

As Larry David would say: pretty-pretty-pretty dumb.

Re:staying on the subject

[ajs]

Sometimes the TiVo suggestion feature is stupid, but on the other hand, it's far superior to surfing channels. If you're out of "scheduled items" to record, and you want to surf, you're far more likely to find something interesting in the suggestions. What you ran into was probably before the most recent upgrade. It seems to have been a bug, and I ran into it too (I gave a thumbs up to something that was vaguely western, and TiVo couldn't get enough of recording old Westerns).

I recommend trying it again. Give an explicit two-thumbs up to anything that you really like and three thumbs up to the two things you think are the best shows/movies on. Leave the default on-thumb for everything that you set up to record, but set anything to neutral that you record on speculation.

I find that 50-60% of the stuff it records for me is junk, which is a much better rate than surfing channels, at least in my experience.

Re:Working link w/o registration

[airrage]

"I'm just counterprogramming because TiVo thinks I'm gay."

That really is quite funny. I think we've hit on a new tech-term: counterprogramming - noun - to use the front-end of a software program to perform operations with which the backend program should have been able to do in the first place.

Or, even better...

[devphil]

...give a checkbox in the user preferences, "I {do,do not} have an interest in stories from subscription-only sites."

don't anthropomorphize computers. they hate that.

[ceo]

I find it interesting that people are talking about their Tivo's like they're sentient beings crouched on top of the TV, casting judgement on the crap you watch and recommending new crap to watch. It's just a computer program, people, and likely a fairly simple one at that.

I don't have a Tivo (or a TV, for that matter), but my Amazon profile still hasn't recovered from when my wife was in graduate school studying developmental psychology, specializing in childhood trauma. More books about child sexual abuse, just what I wanted. =:-O The programming books are staging a comeback, though.

What I find particularly interesting are the "people who ordered this also ordered these" selections. On infrequently-ordered titles, it only takes one or two wackos with bizarre profiles to generate some really peculiar results.

Poor AI AI is poor

[corvi42]

As a student of AI & Cognitive Sciences, it makes me laugh to see this stuff finally coming around. I've thought for years that this kind of tracking was absurd for exactly these reasons. AI in its many forms is still primitive and it is not easy for anyone, even the experts to make it work well. It is almost impossible for it to be made infallible.

While I can't really know what kind of effort was put into these systems, it seems unlikely that Amazon or TiVo hired a team of veteran AI developpers to build these features. That being said, this problem still underlies a trend in all AI systems, no matter how good. That is that they are all really quite dumb when you compare them to anything we would call "reasonable" intelligence. They are incredibly fallible, incredibly silly machines in terms of their output to a large extent. Sure they can be made to do wonderful things, but it always has to be done with a group of human "moderators" to judge and assess the machine's performance and output, and that with a large grain of salt.

The idea that a machine is objective and not biased like people is absurd. They are more biased. They can only follow mindlessly the rules set down for them by their designers, and do not have the breadth or depth of experience that people have to know when the rules don't apply. Even the best dynamic systems and neural nets have these flaws somewhere or other. While it is funny to see them goof like this, it is scary to think that Governments are going to use similar techniques for vital things like law enforcement. This is a serious concern to all of our civil rights.