AI making things weird

James Balden
1 min readDec 2, 2020

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Artificial Intelligence is hard to nail down. With a so many different ideas about what constitutes AI it can be hard to explain. When you start to pin it down and focus on an aspect say machine learning it becomes less exciting. Artificial intelligence works like other things in programming. Look at a function, it is part of a program that should do one thing very very well. This is basically the idea behind machine learning it has to be narrow and do one thing well. The more broad an AI’s problem the less successful it is. This is far less interesting than the fantastical AIs in pop culture. When you find out how much trouble AI has making pictures of cats vs a portrait, you realize there isn’t much to worry about from them taking over the world, at least for the foreseeable future.

Where AI is interesting is in how it is affected by it’s creators, because humans have bias they can inadvertently add their own personal bias to the AI that is being trained. The data used to train an algorithm can cause the AI to make bad decisions or perpetuate problems that were of a human nature now making them more potent with the superhuman abilities of a machine. This means that great care needs to be taken when training machine learning algorithms and developing AI so that we don’t pass on our human biases to machines.

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James Balden
James Balden

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