Looming AI Takeover: Coronavirus
Who would think this year would start off with a worldwide epidemic of coronavirus? At least I didn’t expect it. ┑(￣Д ￣)┍
This disease killed over 8,272 people from 205,642 reported cases (4% death rate), wiped out 2,352.60 Dow points (10% fall) of the stock market, and restrained almost everyone from going out. The internet has been flooded with falsehoods, conspiracy theories, and exaggerations about the coronavirus since the outbreak emerged last December in Wuhan, China.
The outbreak has been falsely blamed on the 5G rollout damaging immune systems, an experiment went wrong in a Chinese research facility, and, of course, the Rothschilds wanting more money, this time through their ownership of a patent to coronavirus.
More dangerous than those conspiracy theories is misleading medical advice, even when it comes with good intentions. Numerous rumors say that children would be immune from the very contagious disease or smothering sesame oil in your nostrils would protect you from infection.
If people follow the advice, they could put lives at risk.
Social media is never a dream or rosy place where you find cats or rainbow unicorns everywhere. It is a dark place and it has always been.
The Dirty Job Of Social Media
The Cleaners is about the outsourced workers that these companies use to determine whether photos and videos that have been shared online should be allowed to stay there. The film tracks a handful of people based in Manila that spend their days looking at terrorist videos, political propaganda, self-harm videos, and child pornography, breaking them into binary categories: “ignore,” where they let the post stand, and “delete,” where the imagery is removed for violating community standards.
It is a dirty job. The social media cleaners are so overwhelmed that platform owning companies need to hire psychiatrists to consult with the employees. It is living everyday torment.
Luckily, with help from thousands of well-trained specialists, we get to have an online space with ratings and censorship (good or bad).
But…Giants Are Backing Down
With all being said above and under pressure from governments and medical experts, tech firms are ramping up their efforts to combat the misinformation. On Monday, Google, Facebook, Microsoft, Twitter, YouTube, Reddit, and LinkedIn issued a joint statement announcing that they were working together to tackle the problem.
But as the misinformation grows and the tech giants start sending their staff home to work, these efforts are increasingly reliant on AI.
YouTube, its parent company Google, and Twitter have all announced that this is forcing them to rely more on AI moderation, while Facebook has stated that the loss of human reviewers would lead the company to “increase our reliance on proactive detection in other areas to remove violating content.”
Prepare Your Best Men… Of Customer Service
AI moderation struggles to match the accuracy of humans, particularly when there are fewer people to review the decisions. How would people feel when their contents got falsely removed by an algorithm? I guess the things they would complain in the Contact Me form would not be very nice.
As all of the chaos going on, and people are trapped indoor with too much time on hand, social media activities are surging to the next level. Especially when politicians, journalists, and even medical authorities all peddling false narratives about coronavirus, people are double-guessing everything they know. It is a hard time both in real life and on social media.
Will AI successfully do its job? Can it handle this situation? We can only know as time goes.
