Without Humans, Artificial Intelligence Is Still Pretty Stupid (wsj.com)

Christopher Mims, writing for WSJ: The internet giants that tout their AI bona fides have tried to make their algorithms as human-free as possible, and that's been a problem. It has become increasingly apparent over the past year that building systems without humans "in the loop" -- especially in the case of Facebook and the ads it linked to 470 "inauthentic" Russian-backed accounts -- can lead to disastrous outcomes, as actual human brains figure out how to exploit them. Whether it's winning at games like Go or keeping watch for Russian influence operations, the best AI-powered systems require humans to play an active role in their creation, tending and operation (Editor's note: the link could be paywalled; alternative source). Facebook, of course, is now a prime example of this trend. The company recently announced it would add 10,000 content moderators to the 10,000 it already employs -- a hiring surge that will impact its future profitability, said Chief Executive Mark Zuckerberg.

Comments

"disastrous outcome?"

[ScentCone]

It has become increasingly apparent over the past year that building systems without humans "in the loop" -- especially in the case of Facebook and the ads it linked to 470 "inauthentic" Russian-backed accounts -- can lead to disastrous outcomes

Because ... a few tens of thousands of dollars worth of FB ads actually caused people who loved Hillary to suddenly vote for the person they hated? This non-sly bit of editorializing (that the Clintons not regaining power to sell access from the White House was a "disaster" brought on by social media externalities) is laughable. Insufficient human involvement in FB's ad-processing may indeed have allowed some pot-stirring foreigners to run ads, but they also allowed an endless stream of domestically-passed-around fake news and toxic memes that were vitriolically and relentlessly anti-Trump to saturate news feeds in the months leading up to the election. None of these things somehow tricked Clinton into regularly showing her patronizing contempt for flyover-country voters. Hillary Clinton wasn't somehow persuaded by Russian ads to blow off even setting foot in Wisconsin while expecting that state to giver her their electoral college votes anyway. The Democrats didn't lose a thousand legislative seats, most of the governorships and both houses of congress during the Obama administration because of minuscule Russian FB ad buys in 2016. This reference to FB's ads buys leading to "disaster" is just another disingenuous attempt to deflect from what really happened.

If there's a "disaster" to describe, it would be the shocking amount of cash the Democrats spent and the celebrity-entertainment-news-industrial-complex expenditure of good will and political capital that was spectacularly squandered in trying to convince people to vote for a chilly, robotically unlikable scold of a candidate with no constructive message and a long record of corruption ... who characterized herself entitlement to power based on gender, and who promised to use the Supreme Court as a new legislature. What a huge waste of time and resources.