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"(00:54:33) An employee asks what Google is going to do about “misinformation” and “fake news” shared by “low-information voters.” Pichai responds by stating th

• jf 8y ago
  Using AI to manipulate what you see is already happening - especially if you browse the web without an adblocker.
  • jiojfdsal3 8y ago
    Yeah, but this directly has ramifications for our democracy, doesn't it? It looks they're actively trying to prevent certain content from being seen while exposing the content Google executives feel the masses 'should' see. This doesn't seem very neutral to me. The leaked video is quite disturbing.
    • IggleSniggle 8y ago
      Every action or inaction with any social context is a political action. Who gets to decide what “neutral” even is, anyway? Of course this has ramifications for our democracy, along with every single other piece of media you’ve ever consumed. I want my search engine to make me smarter and better informed and not baby me with only the content I already know or believe. In that respect, I don’t want censorship. But I also don’t want it to try and feed me just any old information that happens to be sitting around.
    • dragonwriter 8y ago
      > It looks they're actively trying to prevent certain content from being seen while exposing the content Google executives feel the masses 'should' see. Even if they were doing this overtly to promote a political view rather than to address the problem—false information—that the question expressly raises, this would be protected political speech. > This doesn't seem very neutral to me. Even if it didn't (and the actual answer to the actual question does not suggest political bias unless false propaganda uniquely favors one side), so what? What corporation, particularly in the business of distributing current events information, is strictly politically neutral? Certainly none of the ones pushing the narrative that this should be considered disturbing.
• imustbeevil 8y ago
  I've used the internet long enough to not want to spend another second reading a lie someone wrote a news article about.
  • jiojfdsal3 8y ago
    I didn't have to read the article. I just watched the leaked video with my own eyes in its entirety.
    • imustbeevil 8y ago
      You misunderstood. I'm responding to the idea that we wouldn't want to filter the aggregation of content on the internet. I overwhelmingly disagree that an unfiltered stream of everything everyone wants to say is the only way to consume that content. As in the example I gave, I would rather have a robot determine whether someone is lying before that content gets to me.
• ocdtrekkie 8y ago
  The core of Google's business model is using AI to manipulate what people see. (Hint: Mostly ads.) Whether you want to argue it's politically-biased is a separate discussion. Spam filtering is arguably using AI to manipulate what the user sees. In that case, it's less spam. A lot of AI is focused on finding what's the most interesting/valuable to the user, removing "bad" data, etc. Members of most political parties, arguably, would like fake news and misinformation to be curated away, it's just that those parties often disagree with what news is "fake".
• shams93 8y ago
  The solution is actually free college education for everyone who wants it, even if not everyone will be able to use it on their job the only solution is massively easier access to quality education that teaches you how to think, not what to think. The lack of critical thinking skills is a real problem but its largely by designs, some in DC think having an economic draft is a good thing and an educated population is not welcomed.
  • paulddraper 8y ago
    Wait...how many years of free education do you need to learn "how to think"?
    • mcny 8y ago
      I don't know but I think I learned quite a bit just talking to fellow students in the hallways and in the dorm.
  • mc32 8y ago
    Will those intructors teach from both sides of the political spectrum and give both major philosophies similar time?
    • mcny 8y ago
      A good professor can have their bias but still encourage critical thinking. I'm from a university informally (?) affiliated to the Southern Baptist Convention in Texas. We often started our chemistry class with a reading of Psalms. We called the Paris Hilton tax/inheritance tax the "death tax" in our economics class as well as in our US History since 1867 class. In my limited experience, professors are able to teach students to think for themselves even when they disagree with me. I learned a lot but I don't think college made me a "conservative". I was mortified to see our University president on TV demanding religious exemption from birth control in employee health insurance.
      • mc32 8y ago
• vernie 8y ago
  Damn those scare quotes are really scary.
• gizmo686 8y ago
  That is literally what Google was founded on. Their core technology behind their initial success was pagerank, an algorithm whose sole purpose is to manipulate what people see. They have stayed dominant through a combination of market forces, and keeping their algorithm near (or, IMO at) the top of the market for generalized search [0], and have leveraged this competency in other markets (video, ads, etc). Beyond just Google, this is an inevitable result of having any which resembles the internet we know today. The alternative is to go back to human gatekeepers. While it is arguable if human gatekeepers are better from a consumption standpoint, it is clear that they are worse from a production standpoint, as it massivly increases the barriers to publication. [0] In actuality, I suspect that Google's "algorithm" involves a fair bit of "cheating" by having humans nudge the results. Political bias aside, I think not doing this would leave them too open to attack from other players in the market who do.
  • roenxi 8y ago
    I value political neutrality in the workplace, so I have a lot of in-principle issues with what is being shown here right from the get-go. I didn't wind the video back to find the exact quote, but we now have publicised evidence of senior leadership at Google who stood up and said 'obviously our values are not the same as a big chunk of Americans'. Clearly a lot of them are specific Hillary supporters, a candidate so unelectable she lost to Trump. There is a practical difference between pagerank, which is a transparent algorithm, and a non-transparent magic algorithm that is controlled by a group who are clearly not engaged with the idea of corporate political neutrality. Taking the views expressed here as a starting point, logically why shouldn't they try to tilt the election result using their power? EDIT I'm just going to add this in because it just doesn't sit well. It shouldn't acceptable for leadership in a workplace to stand up and express pain and dismay at the outcome of a democratic process.
    • gizmo686 8y ago
      As I mentioned elsewhere in this thread, I think search should be regulated, and part of that regulation should be some standard for political neutrality [0]. However, there is no neutral algorithm to this problem. Any algorithm favors certain sites over others. There is almost definitely going to be some correlation between the sites that are favored and the content of those sites, political or otherwise. There is simply no getting around that. The discussion we need to be having is how to do this in an acceptable way. [0] I do not have a good idea of what such a standard would even look like, and would err on the side of being too lax in this regard.
• peterwwillis 8y ago
  What media organization on this planet doesn't make decisions about what users should and shouldn't see? Breitbart does it, The New York Times does it, your local news channels do it. Google as a news broker is literally just showing you what Google wants to show you. I don't know why you'd think they wouldn't have a bias, or filter their output based on it. All media does.
  • adventured 8y ago
    None of those is a fraction as powerful as Google, which is an $800 billion goliath with multiple hyper entrenched monopolies. Those monopolies entirely change the equation and expectations. Search, Android, YouTube. All three of those are either monopolies or close to it. YouTube by itself is worth a solid 20 times what the NY Times is. Breitbart is maybe worth $100m, a top 100 US Web site with a couple million readers. The NY Times is a $3.6b business, with maybe 10x the daily readership of Breitbart (and a much more lucrative readership of course). If those two want to duke it out with each other, fine. Just like with Fox or MSNBC. None of them possess monopoly positions, much less in extraordinarily large, critical information pathways, as with search, YouTube and Android. If Microsoft had acted in 1999-2000, during its peak Windows monopoly power, to use the desktop + IE in some manner to try to throw the Bush v Gore election in favor of Bush, the Democrats would have more than lost their minds over that. It would have been considered an extraordinary abuse of monopoly power by Microsoft. Google is going to soon find out they've unleashed a political genie that is never going back into the bottle.
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    • peterwwillis 8y ago
      Where'd you get that number? Google made 109 billion last year, not 800. Alphabet made 110 billion. Amazon made 177 billion. In comparison, Facebook made just 40 billion in revenue, but more people get their news from Facebook today than anywhere else. So really it's Facebook that's let the genie out, and they didn't need to be the wealthiest corporation or a monopoly to do it. These are large corporations made up of lots of people and represent a wide array of shareholders' concerns. But individual billionaires also own media companies, and thus can have greater personal influence on what is expressed through those companies. https://www.forbes.com/sites/katevinton/2016/06/01/these-15-billionaires-own-americas-news-media-companies/ https://www.forbes.com/sites/katevinton/2016/06/01/these-15-...
• dmead 8y ago
  Nope. better them than putin or steve bannon, or anyone who works at breitbart
• randyrand 8y ago
  It does bother me that they never acknowledge the more knowledgeable and informed trump voters. To think they don’t exist is almost as ignorant as the people they’re referring to.
  • tkmo 8y ago
    Interestingly, Credit Rating is one of the strongest predictors of voting Republican
    • happytoexplain 8y ago
      I don't think it's surprising that there's little relevance between somebody's financial wellbeing/decision-making and their tendency to believe misleading or false news that concerns political identity/ideology.
  • happytoexplain 8y ago
    I see this complaint a lot - "hey, we/they are not like that", in response to a discussion about some perceived problem originating from within a broad group of people (I see it happen on all sides, but maybe more often from conservatives in response to liberal "elitism"), and often it is legitimate, but a lot of the time it sadly is just used as an off-topic attack on the conversation. E.g. when somebody tries to discuss the "bad apples" in the police, instead of actually discussing them, the conversation often gets shifted by indignant supporters of the larger group, in this case all police, who feel attacked by the conversation. I often wonder how to avoid this - obviously the person bringing up the controversy must not have an aggressive, accusational tone, but even then these kinds of reactions seem omnipresent in any forum. I wonder how many of the people reacting this way are just reacting emotionally, and how many truly believe the premise of the topic is actually utterly false ("there are NO bad apples in the police"), or feel that it might be true, but that the framing is somehow always an irrational attack on the entire group they are a member of.
• droopybuns 8y ago
  Deeply. Between gmail’s the auto-reply that tries to anticipate how I would respond to an email and the material in this video, I motivated to get off of gmail and all google products. I can appreciate that they were disappointed in the election results. I am shocked to see leaders of a Fortune 100 company responding this way, in that forum. What are they thinking? That there is no legitimate reason for voting against Hillary? That all who have a different opinion than them are evil? I have been really skeptical about James Damore- and I still think he’s a tragic clown, but now I am rethinking a few things: Google appears to be a liberal monoculture that cannot understand legitimate alternative viewpoints. Google’s leadership has no instinct to curb potentially controversial opinions in front of their own ranks. Clearly, no libertarians or conservatives work at google. Who would tolerate this kind of intolerance from their employer?
• dragonwriter 8y ago
  It's only disturbing if you reject the premise of the question in advance—that the concern is addressing inaccurate factual information. Connecting users with good information is literally the function on which Google wad founded, and applying AI to that mission has been a Google vision from very early on. It would be weird and worrying if Google selectively choose not to do that with information that might have political salience.
  • Digory 8y ago
    Right, but google’s premise is/was that it is feeding you the unfiltered view of the crowd. If not the world, at least of American computer users. That’s some signal about invariably qualitative judgments on facts. “Hillary Emails” should give you results based on global pagerank, whether or not you agree with the subjective assessments about the importance of Hillary’s emails. Silently substituting the pagerank of New York or the subjective judgment of a room of Googlers undercuts the signal. If you give me the option to filter by DC or LA pagerank, that’s fine. But there should always be some free, unfiltered pagerank available.
    • wyldfire 8y ago
      > Right, but google’s premise is/was that it is feeding you the unfiltered view of the crowd. Actually, I don't think that's the case. Google has for a very long time considered a web site's reputation as part of a page's weight among search results. IMO Google wasn't a primary transmission medium for fake news -- not like Facebook et al. So if you got to a fake news article from Google.com, you probably went looking for it. To your point -- if you go searching for unique terms from the fake news articles, it seems reasonable/appropriate to show you the fake news websites from whence they came. It would be odd for Google to omit those sources that are likely the best/primary source of those terms. It might be reasonable to highlight the search results as coming from a source known to publish falsehoods. Like the "This site may harm your computer" warnings, it could be a clear flag for people to be skeptical. Unfortunately, it seems like they would be inheriting a morass of subjective or difficult to maintain criteria.
    • dragonwriter 8y ago
• cjhanks 8y ago
  It is very disturbing. The notion that artificial intelligence can intercept information from individuals, and properly classify its accuracy seems dangerous. It works with much of internet content, because formal communication has proper structure. But that is beside the point. The real question is - who is responsible for classifying the training data? And what makes them qualified?
• supernovae 8y ago
  People need to understand that fake news is an algorithm used against people - whether or not there is tech or AI pushing it. Those who push fake news know how it programs humans. Having humans interpret what is real/fake is hard to do without bias, cheating, manipulation, favoritism and so much more. Google knows social signal processing, it could implement ranking/scoring based on sites like PolitiFact and how many major news outlets are covering it, how the bios of the writers/contributors are - what the social graph of their reach is yaddy yaddy yadda. We have signals for so much - that even humans use to sort/score what is real/what isn't. An AI would be able to do much of this based on social graphs and understanding of sources, targets, links, attributions and so much more. For me, the scary thing isn't using AI to filter known lies, the scary thing is that we have AI that can do this but don't do anything because we have let the value of fake news be worth more than the value of standing for truth.
• smsm42 8y ago
  Yes. They think they can figure out what we should see (and how we should vote, obviously) and their mission, as good people, is helping us to get there. Kicking and screaming, if needed, it's all for our own good at the end. Yes, it is concerning. That's why there should be many search engines, and that's why everybody should support projects like DuckDuckGo. Having one corporation - with however noblest intentions they see themselves - solely controlling information input of billions is not healthy, no matter what your politics is.
• grumdan 8y ago
  Isn't this only disturbing if one rejects there being an objective distinction between misinformation and information? Sure, there are gray areas, but there are many actors exposing people to indisputably factually false claims, and "false" in this sentence is quite often not a political concept or subjective. The pope didn't endorse Trump. Trump's inauguration crowd was not the largest in history, etc. Google may be involved in a lot of manipulative things, but trying to distinguish between blatantly incorrect sources of information and the rest does not seem like a shady political motive to me, and there overall goal seems worthwhile to me. Encyclopedias and scientific journals also manipulate what people are seeing and I don't think filtering mechanisms in general are problematic; it depends on how the information is selected, and if this is done through a good process, it can be very beneficial.
• on_and_off 8y ago
  serious question : How else are they supposed to treat information at this scale ?