Could Artificial Intelligence be working purely for you and me?
Companies like Facebook, Google, Amazon, and IBM, have been recruiting top A.I. scholars and putting them in corporate research positions where they are allowed to publish academic papers and refine their studies. As these businesses invest heavily and gain some of the biggest minds in the field, some technologists have expressed concern that these technology giants have the potential to steer A.I. research in ways that only benefit their bottom lines.
Picture Source: MIT Technology Review
Let us look at Facebook as an example – in an interview with Joaquin Candela, Director of Engineering for Applied Machine Learning at Facebook, by the Wired, he mentioned that he had overseen a transformation of the company’s advertising operation since 2012, using a machine learning approach to make sponsored posts more relevant and effective. Facebook needs its system to do something that no human is capable of – make an instant and accurate prediction of how many people will click on a given ad. He also spoke at a New York City conference in January 2017, saying that “Facebook today cannot exist without A.I. Every time you use Facebook or Instagram or Messenger, you may not realize it, but your experiences are being powered by A.I.” If you liked your friends’ food pictures, Facebook would likely feed you with more food pictures from your other friends in the next newsfeed, hoping you engage with the platform more. Higher engagement rates are often inferred as higher satisfaction or better user experience. If you search for a pair of diamond earrings online, Facebook would feed you with more and more jewelry ads in the coming days or months.
As an end user, how do you know if the technology giant is powering your experience in your preferred way? Or are they simply trying to feed you ads/images/links that pull more revenue for them?
In 2016, some critics suggested that Facebook could have prevented the spread of fake news on its platform in prelude to Donald Trump’s presidential victory. Made-up news – like a story that claimed the Pope had endorsed Trump – was seen by some political analysts as contributing to Trump’s win. Critics have also said Facebook’s mostly algorithm-controlled newsfeed creates so-called filter bubbles. Controversially, some people say the social network’s algorithms, which are tailored to send users news and information based on their likes, beliefs and habits, can lead to a less-informed society in which counter-opinions or ideas are easily ignored. Facebook A.I. research chief Yann LeCun said in an interview with Fortune that Facebook probably has some technology that it could use to alleviate some of the fake news problem. Is the technology not good enough or is it not deployed?
Based on your own experience, do you think Facebook, Google, other technology companies have served you the way you wish to be served? Do we have a choice as to how their A.I. serve us?
With technology companies taking larger and larger roles in our lives, we need to be aware of the influence they’re wielding on us. They dictate what we think our friends are reading, and what the internet is talking about, what people are buying, what apps are trending, etc. etc. Whether the filter bubble is real or not, there’s an awfully lot of filtering/recommendation happening, and we don’t exactly know how they work under the hood. We are living in an information overflow era where human attention is the ultimate scarcity, therefore we should have a say in what information we want to receive. How do we solve it? I think we need to have a client-side A.I. that talks to its corporate counterparts and handle information flow for us. It’ll be open-sourced. It’ll be by the users, for the users. Much of the Internet eco-system is supported by ads. So this A.I. needs to be sensitives towards that, or else it can never gain acceptance from the corporations. The needed user data can be provided by individual users in a privacy-protected way via Blockchain. No single entity will own the data, and anyone who wants to enjoy it will need to contribute their own. Essentially, it is a de-centralized, peer-to-peer network of preference data and intelligence. We ought to think about how to gain some control over we are being fed.
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References:
[1] http://fortune.com/2016/12/01/facebook-artificial-intelligence-news/
[2] https://www.wired.com/2017/02/inside-facebooks-ai-machine/
[3] https://www.marketingweek.com/2017/05/23/google-attribution-ai/
[4] https://www.sciencealert.com/google-is-improving-its-artificial-intelligence-with-artificial-intelligence
[5] https://www.nytimes.com/2016/12/14/magazine/the-great-ai-awakening.html
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7 comments on “Could Artificial Intelligence be working purely for you and me?”
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Thanks for your sharing. It is interesting to hear about how giant companies affect our lives through AI. People believe what they choose to believe and the judgements are always based on their personal preference. Through collecting user data, companies like Facebook offer users information or advertisements they show interest. Although some people take it as a way making life more convenient, personally I think it is another way to block the access to information available. Every time I was hoping to see views from different perspectives or explore something new, the “recommendations” based on my using history always cost me more time to find what I want. Another thing is that through AI, it’s easier for giant companies to understand and affect users’ behavior. And as you mentioned, consumers in this case only have limited bargaining power. I think client-side AI can be helpful in some way.
Fan MS&E 238A
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Hi Fan, thank you for sharing your personal experience. The extended time required for finding diverse opinions or new discovery, is frustrating.
This is a great post. I would encourage you to look into BAT and Brave, the browser and associated token created by the guy who made Mozilla. He cites some similar views about how advertising runs the internet and how little control / privacy independent users of the web have as a result.
His proposal is very interesting, which is probably (at least in part) why the project was able to raise so much capitol so quickly. He wants to use a custom browser built around a public ledger to create a more honest, user centric web. My group will actually be presenting about the project briefly on Friday and our paper will cover it more in depth
https://basicattentiontoken.org/
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Hi Kyle, thanks for the compliment and sharing. I like the idea of BAT and Brave. Look forward to see your group presentation and paper. Cheers!
Cool — I look forward to Kyles presentation also!
Kam, to answer your question: No, the virtual space (incl AI interference) is just another marketplace trying to maximize profit. It’s disappointing. If I share on Facebook that I’m trying to be more healthy, their AI should cater to that and show me great healthy food recipes vs trying to sell me ice cream (because that’s what I almost added in my Instacart earlier that day.) The AI algorithms are very powerful and could be applied for good.
Thank you Kam for a very informative post. You mention how some suggeste that fake news on Facebook contributed to Trump’s win, and talk about filter bubbles. Some critics take it much further than that blaming Cambridge Analytica and their data-driven communications for manipulating people, in essence they first psychographically categorized voters and then addressed them differently on and off social media. For the full story I highly recommend this article: https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/mg9vvn/how-our-likes-helped-trump-win.
Interstingly, Cambridge Analytica actually leverages Stanford Professor Michal Kosinski’s psychometric research on personality analysis based on Facebook activity.
I was caught by the title of your article. Through reading it, I realized that a lot of my recent decisions have been led by advertisement that I saw on social media (Facebook). I would have never found out about Stanford if I didnt see the ad on FB due to a friend liking it. It happens, as you mentioned, that most of the flow of information in ads is purely unimportant to most users. Personally, at times, it becomes frustrating to me because the ads cover a lot of the feed that I receive with irrelevant info, and it often leads me to make decisions based on the availability, that might not be useful at the end.
I figured that the quality of information has improved, and that like the Stanford ad, a lot of the information that I’m getting is proving beneficial.
It could be useful for consumers to have a more specialized service that is specially detailed for their needs; Although unclear, I agree with you on the view, that an open-source client-side A.I through block chain might be the way of sourcing this need.