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When Purchase Recommendations Go Bad
nixman99 writes "An article on MSNBC describes what happens when 'View Similar Products' recommendations go bad. From the article: 'The company said it was alerted to the problem early yesterday afternoon after word began spreading among bloggers. When visitors to Walmart.com requested Planet of the Apes: The Complete TV Series on DVD, four other movies were recommended under the heading Similar Items. Those films included Martin Luther King: I Have A Dream/Assassination of MLK and Unforgivable Blackness: The Rise and Fall of Jack Johnson.'"
Connection:
Planet Of The Apes - Social Commentary.
Martin Luther King - Import changer of society.
Were you to be a glass is half full kind of person, that sounds like a connection. I could entirely accept that enough customers to trigger a connection algorithm are interested in social commentary to the degree that both titles appeal.
Were you to be a glass is half empty kind of person, clearly the system is racist.
Fortunately, we have a media that's only interested in postive and uplifting stories so they'd never focus purely on the negative, for shock value, without considering other possible alternatives.
And, for added amusement, type "Civ 4" in to Amazon and see what recommendations come up further down the list. It may too be racist. It may be a deeply humorous commentary on lonely guys playing Civ 4. Or it may be some other connection that we haven't figured out yet.
But then that's the whole point of data mining... Finding connections that humans tend to be entirely too preoccupied by their assumptions to be able to see beyond.
Check out the "also try" recommendations. :)
d s+with+guns&sm=Yahoo!+Search&toggle=1&ei=UTF-8&fr= FP-tab-web-t
http://images.search.yahoo.com/search/images?p=ki
Isn't this a corruption of Hanlon's Razor which states that:
"Never attribute to malice that which can be adequately explained by stupidity"
In this case, it could be construed that either the system, or the people making the malicious links are the stupid element - both could come to the racial conclusion by misinterpreting the data. Alternatively, the system might be too smart, working in a logical way such that elements in subject matter for both Planet of the Apes and Martin Luther King both deal with social commentary, alienation and segregation.
Either way, the comments by the spokesperson that the system was malfunctioning and not working as it was supposed to are probably incorrect; it work exactly as it was programmed, but it was either too stupid or too smart for us to comprehend adequately.