DexLab Analytics’ Take on the scope of Artificial Intelligence: Its Humanity vs. Algorithms

A recent controversy around Facebook’s trending topics has raised an important question on the relevance of Artificial Intelligence (AI). The trending section on the company’s website, recently, had featured a ‘news’, stating that FOX news has fired its anchor Megyn Kelly because on her political believes. However, the news was eventually proved false and that has raised many questions on the responsibilities of Facebook. Later, the company has commented on the topic, saying that the story had qualified at all parameters for becoming a trending topic. Nevertheless, the story was removed from the website as soon as it was found fake.

Biased flow of information

The controversy originally started in May, when Facebook’s former employees had spoken to Gizmodo. They said that depending on the nature of trending topics, sometimes they ‘suppressed’ several stories on conservative topics. The company’s ex-employees further stated that they often added stories by themselves into the trending section. This confession raised doubts of ‘human biases’ in information flow, leading an US Senator to ask for explanation from Facebook. After months of experiment, the company finally decided to get rid of human bias, and consequently fired the team of 18 ‘news feed curators’, who were accused of controlling content of the trending section.

Humans or Artificial Intelligence: Who is better?

Just a couple of days after laying-off their employees, the ‘Megyn Kelly’ incident took place. DexLab Analytics review the entire story to figure out what went wrong. Now that Facebook has defended their faults, new questions are raised on whether firing their employees had done anything positive for the Company. This time, the controversy is much more serious, since it has to do everything with Artificial Intelligence (AI), or algorithms. Since the firing of the editing panel, the selection of trending topics was conducted by algorithms that were designed to do so. Now the question is, whether algorithms can select real news over fake stories. Nonetheless, Facebook has dismissed all the accusations and said that nothing has changed since the change in the panel. According to the Social Media giant, the ‘news curators’ only provided short descriptions and headlines to the trending topics, while the content were originally selected by programmed algorithms, which is similar to the current status.

Experiments that went wrong

Although Facebook is focusing on developing automated services recently, other tech companies, namely Microsoft and Google, have made such attempts in the past. While Microsoft had launched a robotic Twitter handle, named Tay, Google is constantly experimenting on their self-driven car. Microsoft’s Tay, according to the company, was meant to interact with people. It was supposed to learn new things and languages, every time it spoke with others. In fact, it was intentionally designed for making playful conversations. However, the situation changed fast and quite drastically, as within a day of its birth, Tay became a firm Nazi and an anti-feminist, by belief. Even Tay’s guardian (read Microsoft), was clueless since they reported building the program using public data only after cleaning, filtering and modelling them. Still, they could not stop Tay from being corrupted. Google, on the other hand, reported that their automatic car had crashed while moving from one lane to the other, though their technology was found least responsible for the accident.

With so many ‘technology gone wrong’ cases in history, we still do not have a clear idea whether AI would be able to perform better tasks than what humans can, in the near future. It is obviously the perfect time to conduct experiments, but it is also a responsibility of the companies to make sure no one is harassed without a reason.

About DexLab Analytics: DexLab Analytics, which is based in Gurgaon provides training in Big Data Analytics. Its trainers include core industry professionals who have huge experience in the specific field, therefore providing students an in-depth education that is rare on today’s date.