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Meanwhile, misuses of ML are proliferating without limits Are they? Where? For all the hype I haven't seen any obvious abuses of AI. I've seen better speech r

Meanwhile, misuses of ML are proliferating without limits Are they? Where? For all the hype I haven't seen any obvious abuses of AI. I've seen better speech recognition and a few other useful things. I've seen stuff that's wrong but ultimately kind of trivial like auto-generated porn with celebrity faces, but that's the worst stuff so far. I haven't seen clear, unambiguous cases of abuse beyond that. I've seen a lot of allegations that AI is being abused e.g. "Russian bots" but on investigation these stories usually evaporate. If anything I've been kind of disappointed by AI so far. Amazing demo videos abound, but I'd guess 90% of the impact of AI in my life has been Google improving their already quite good services. Better translations, better search results etc. All very welcome but not really life changing.

visarga 7y ago
> better search results Funny you say that. I was recently searching for a e-scooter lighter than 10Kg and all Google could find was the max allowed weight of the person riding the thing (around 100-130kg). Not to mention that it didn't understand how to make a conjunction and show me light e-scooters with suspension. It's just matching keywords without understanding anything about the relations between them. I am disappointed at the current quality of Google search, especially in shopping related queries where money is to be made. Instead of stuffing my pages with irrelevant 'personally' targeted ads and tracking my every move they should make an effort in that particular moment when I actually want to buy something and give me a good suggestion.
- derefr 7y ago
  Coincidentally, this kind of "modelling the question" is what IBM's Watson is/was supposed to be uniquely good at. It seems like Google hasn't even really considered entering the same space. Maybe each query has too high a incremental cost to run for them to be profitable right now?
kuzehanka 7y ago
> I haven't seen clear, unambiguous cases of abuse beyond that. That's the power of these things. Would you know you're reading a social media comment generated by something akin to this? No, at best it would be ambiguous. There is no way for an everyday person to tell how much of their life is impacted by ML at this point.
- repolfx 7y ago
  But I don't decide anything based on reading social media comments unless it makes a good point, which GPT2 text never does (so far). I honestly wouldn't care much if I was reading stuff written by bots, as long as I didn't waste time talking back ;)

visarga 7y ago

> better search results Funny you say that. I was recently searching for a e-scooter lighter than 10Kg and all Google could find was the max allowed weight of the person riding the thing (around 100-130kg). Not to mention that it didn't understand how to make a conjunction and show me light e-scooters with suspension. It's just matching keywords without understanding anything about the relations between them. I am disappointed at the current quality of Google search, especially in shopping related queries where money is to be made. Instead of stuffing my pages with irrelevant 'personally' targeted ads and tracking my every move they should make an effort in that particular moment when I actually want to buy something and give me a good suggestion.

derefr 7y ago
Coincidentally, this kind of "modelling the question" is what IBM's Watson is/was supposed to be uniquely good at. It seems like Google hasn't even really considered entering the same space. Maybe each query has too high a incremental cost to run for them to be profitable right now?

kuzehanka 7y ago

> I haven't seen clear, unambiguous cases of abuse beyond that. That's the power of these things. Would you know you're reading a social media comment generated by something akin to this? No, at best it would be ambiguous. There is no way for an everyday person to tell how much of their life is impacted by ML at this point.

repolfx 7y ago
But I don't decide anything based on reading social media comments unless it makes a good point, which GPT2 text never does (so far). I honestly wouldn't care much if I was reading stuff written by bots, as long as I didn't waste time talking back ;)