Reminds me of an early application of AI where scientists were training an AI to tell the difference between a wolf and a dog. It got really good at it in the training data, but it wasn’t working correctly in actual application. So they got the AI to give them a heatmap of which pixels it was using more than any other to determine if a canine is a dog or a wolf and they discovered that the AI wasn’t even looking at the animal, it was looking at the surrounding environment. If there was snow on the ground, it said “wolf”, otherwise it said “dog”.
Early chess engine that used AI, were trained by games of GMs, and the engine would go out of its way to sacrifice the queen, because when GMs do it, it’s comes with a victory.
Reg, why’d you just stab yourself in the shoulder?
Ah cmon, ain’t ya ever seen a movie?
Well of course I’ve seen a movie, but what the hell are ya doing?
Every time the guy stabs himself in a movie, it’s right before he kicks the piss outta the guy he’s fightin’!
Well that don’t… when that happens, the guys gotta plan Reg, what the hell’s your plan?
I dunno, but I’m gonna find out!
That’s funny because if I was trying to tell the difference between a wolf and a dog I would look for ‘is it in the woods?’ and ‘how big is it relative to what’s around it?’.
What about telling the difference between a wolf and grandmother?
Look for a bonnet. Wolves don’t wear bonnets.
Yeah, that’s a grandmother, so what?
That reminds me of the time, quite a few years ago, Amazon tried to automate resume screening. They trained a machine learning model with anonymized resumes and whether the candidate was hired. Then they looked at what the AI was looking at. The model had trained itself on how to reject women.
The idea of AI automated job interviews sickens me. How little of a fuck do you have to give about applicants that you can’t even be bothered to have even a single person interview them??
“Bias automation” is kind of an accurate description for how our brains learn things too.
The base assumption is that you can tell anything reliable at all about a person from their body language, speech patterns, or appearance. So many people think they have an intuition for such things but pretty much every study of such things comes to the same conclusion: You can’t.
The reason why it doesn’t work is because the world is full of a diverse set of cultures, genetics, and subtle medical conditions. You may be able to attain something like 60% accuracy for certain personality traits from an interview if the person being interviewed was born and raised in the same type of environment/culture (and is the same sex) as you. Anything else is pretty much a guarantee that you’re going to get it wrong.
That’s why you should only ask interviewees empirical questions that can identify whether or not they have the requisite knowledge to do the job. For example, if you’re hiring an electrical engineer ask them how they would lay out a circuit board. Or if hiring a sales person ask them questions about how they would try to sell your specific product. Or if you’re hiring a union-busting expert person ask them how they sleep at night.
I’ve just started doing practical interviews. I basically get really young people with little overall experience and I just want to know if they can do common technical tasks.
So one question is to literally have them explain how to tighten a bolt. One person failed.
To be fair, that’s a very open ended question. I mean, what kind of bolt are we talking about? A standard lag bolt? If so you don’t tighten it! That’d be a trick question! You tighten the nut. Same thing applies with car wheel bolts. Tricky tricky!
Is it a hex bolt that also has a cross head? How tight are we talking?
I’m just going to assume bolts of lightning and Usain Bolt are off the table.
I really hate that we are calling this wave of technology “AI”, because it isn’t. It is “Machine Learning” sure, but it is just brute force pattern recognition v2.0.
The desired outcomes you define and then the data you train it on both have a LOT of built-in biases.
It’s a cool technology I guess, but it’s being misused across the board. It is being overused and misused by every company with FOMO. Hoping to get some profit edge on the competition. How about we have AI replace the bullshit CEO and VP positions instead of trying to replace fast food drive through workers and Internet content.
I guess that’s nothing new for humans… One human invents the spear for fishing and the rest use them to hit each other over the head.
I agree with most of your points, but i don’t entirely like the “this is not intelligence” line of thought. We don’t even know yet how to define intelligence, and pattern recognition sounds a LOT like what our brains do. The hype is of course ridiculous, and the ways it’s being used is just stupid, but i do think pattern recognition could be a solid basis for whatever we end up considering intelligence.
There’s a ton of great small scale things we can do with machine learning, and even LLM.
Unfortunately, it seems the main usages will be crushing people down even more.
“oooo books he must be really smart”
