Musings on Matters

I read an interesting article the other day by Jane Wakefield titled “Are You Scared Yet? Meet Norman, the psychopathic AI” (https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-44040008).

Per the article, “The psychopathic algorithm was created by a team at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, as part of an experiment to see what training AI on data from ‘the dark corners of the net’ would do to its world view.”  

They trained Norman using “images of people dying in gruesome circumstances” and then showed the AI a series of inkblot pictures to see how it would compare again AI software trained with images of animals and nature.

Norman’s outlook was overwhelmingly dark. (My personal favorite is the one in which regular AI saw “a person holding an umbrella in the air” whereas Norman saw “a man is shot dead in front of his screaming wife.” Gives you the warm and fuzzies, amirite!?)

One of the professors involved in the project commented that one of the conclusions they can assert is that “[d]ata matters more than the algorithm.” There have already been instances of racist and sexist AI, which would make sense given who is programming them (dem white boys over in Silicon Valley - git yo values straight!). As Dr. Joanna Bryson noted "When we train machines by choosing our culture, we necessarily transfer our own biases."

Of course this brings to mind a ton of red flags for me regarding AI advancements, but also makes me wonder what this might teach us about ourselves as humans, our behavior and our psychology. If “[d]ata matters more than the algorithm” in an AI program, does this shed any light on the Nature vs. Nuture debate for human behavior, and that “nurture” really is the deciding factor over “nature”?

Obviously a machine and a human are made two separate ways, but aren’t humans responsible for making both? They’re putting their genetics into the human they make, but do humans put a bit of themselves into their mechanical creations? Clearly they are subconsciously putting themselves into their software, so would it not make sense some essence of them goes into other handmade creations, including robots?

And if we can conclude that AI is only as good as the data it has, and that it might only be as “unbiased” (or biased) as the data whoever is building it decides to feed it, does this not mean that the AI is ultimately only as effective or intuitive as its builder? Would this not also extend to robotics? Because humans are not perfect, are we capable of making anything perfect? Or would it only ever be at least as flawed as the human(s) who created it?

I used to post here and there on Tumblr from an old blog I tried to keep up (I admit I sucked at posting constantly and eventually dropped off all together), but Facebook for me was a social site I used consistently for a long time. Facebook has been a nice and easy way to share things, which is clearly the reason so many people from so many different backgrounds choose to use it.

Despite using Facebook as my primary social media outlet, I’ve always had a love/hate relationship with it, and over the past year with continuing data privacy concerns, it turned more and more to a hate relationship… with little to no love. A few months ago, I deactivated my account. Zuckerberg has always freaked me out (just as a person in general), but the data breach with Cambridge Analytics and Russia and the US election sealed the deal for me. Especially since this isn’t the first time Facebook has questionably handled users’ information or permitted posts of countless false news articles with sensationalist headlines (and yes, this happened before Trump ever said the words “fake news”).

Plus, with all the algorithms and crappy ads, I wasn’t seeing things that made me smile anymore. In fact, when I selected my reason for deactivating Facebook as “Other” and was forced to elaborate in a comment, I wrote: “Facebook no longer brings me any joy.”

But at the same time, I miss the platform that Facebook is. I miss sharing my random blurbs of creative writing with the network there I had established, creating online photo albums easily accessible for friends and family, posting favorite quotes and jokes, reposting what others have shared that I found particularly thought-provoking or poignant, etc.

I am still using Instagram, but as that is part of Facebook aside from the fact it’s only really meant as a photo-sharing platform, I wanted to search for something to hit more of the bases while still offering some degree of data privacy. Google Plus seems to me like the lesser of the two evils when compared to Facebook. They haven’t been called out publicly like Facebook has but there’s something about Google’s ubiquity makes me nervous. Twitter of course you have the character limit which defeats a lot of the purpose of what I’m looking for. Reddit it more of a conversational/commenting site, which I don’t hate, but I am looking for something a bit more conducive to multimedia posting. I’ve looked a bit into Mastodon, but there’s a ton of reasons I don’t think it would be a good fit for me, not to mention they aren’t taking new members on their main page right now. (I should add, if you are reading this and have any suggestions, I am certainly open to them!)

If you are someone who uses anything on the Internet, you’ve probably been getting bombarded with emails and notices regarding updates to privacy policies for sites due to the GDPR in Europe, so I will say my search for finding the privacy policies has been a lot easier than it would have been and they are also (for the most part) a lot easier to understand than they were even just a few months ago at least. In any case, after looking into and thinking about quite a few different alternatives, I landed here.

So here I am. It definitely isn’t perfect (sorry Tumblr, no offense meant), but I think it might be the best platform to create and consume the multimedia type of content I’d like to, at least for the time being. The information Tumblr collects according to its privacy policy, seems to primarily be more generic and less identifying than Facebook (if you haven’t read Tumblr’s privacy policy yet, you can find it here: https://www.tumblr.com/privacy/en), particularly geared towards collecting information for advertising purposes (which I see everywhere anyway, so this isn’t a massive concern for me - definitely a legitimate concern for others I’m sure) and user experience. Then again, I’m sure Facebook claims a lot of their data is used to enhance “user experience”... so much so that I am no longer a user I guess! Essentially for the time being, Tumblr is sufficient for what I’m looking for, but things change fast around here!

The First Kill

Tuesday, November 27, 2012

Remember how not too long ago we had decided (after my hesitancy) to…

November 25, 2012

As of this Special Sunday, Dylan had now been in the U.S. for a little over a month and a half. In that amount of time, he had moved and settled into the apartment, had bought a car, subsequently insured it, and was hired at a job which…

November 25, 2012

As of this Special Sunday, Dylan had now been in the U.S. for a little over a month and a half. In that amount of time, he bad moved and settled into the apartment, had bought a car, subsequently insured it, and was hired at a job which…

A Change of Heart

Thursday, November 15 [I am just going to start dating these posts as to when they happened because…

Back to the blog now, I know the last post was serious and sentimental, but it had to be done. It feels weird to blog now about something that’s not serious after all that’s happened, but I’m thinking of it more as a distraction for me now. So let this…

Boston, You're My Home

I know you weren’t to know where we live, but I think a good number of you, if you didn’t know…

American Politics and the Return of TJ the Mouse

Who knows what the first Tuesday of November in 2012 was? Yea, my title to this post kind of gave…

I Outdrank an Irish Boy