AI has been glamorizing businesses with its gleaming promises. However, we ought to remind ourselves of recent cases where our algorithms did exactly opposite to what we had desired. Here is a list of some ill-fated initiatives that revealed dark side of Artificial Intelligence:
- Amazon‘s hiring tool meant to hire more women did just the reverse. The program was meant to traverse through over 50,000 profiles and help firms look for suitable applicants. Thanks to CVs being fed from men that the algorithm learnt to discriminate against women only.
- Alexa spooked users by randomly laughing out loud at unrelated commands. In other cases, the device randomly played music very loudly in an empty house in Germany when the user wasn’t even home. This prompted neighbors to call the cops to end the “party”.
- Robot Sophia was part of a conversation that fueled the worries of skeptics such as Stephen Hawking. During an interview by its founder, Sophia once expressed its desire to destroy humans while also arguing about robots having more rights than humans.
- Google Home speakers were asked to talk like a married couple. The virtual duo started with seemingly philosophical conversations but at one point, they started to argue which went on for days with both of them abusing each other.
- Microsoft‘s Chatbot Tay was designed to learn the language of millenials. It went from being hip – talking about Taylor Swift and Miley Cyrus – to claiming things like “Bush caused 9/11” and “Hitler did nothing wrong”. It also spurred racial accusations and had to be called off just hours after its launch.
Optimistically speaking, despite all this negative nay-saying and short-term troubles, we will get there. These are the teething pains that we were bound to go through on the road to AI-enriched digital world. Hopefully, there is light at the end of the tunnel!
This content was originally published for my TechTuesday’s initiative on LinkedIn.
