[HN Gopher] Time to regulate AI that interprets human emotions?
___________________________________________________________________
Time to regulate AI that interprets human emotions?
Author : rbanffy
Score : 136 points
Date : 2021-04-07 12:00 UTC (11 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.nature.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.nature.com)
| finnthehuman wrote:
| >Such oversight is essential to defend against systems driven by
| what I call the phrenological impulse: drawing faulty assumptions
| about internal states and capabilities from external appearances,
| with the aim of extracting more about a person than they choose
| to reveal.
|
| I think the reality is a bit more cynical. People are looking to
| filter on who will provide the right social performance. But
| that's not as comfortable to admit when you're on the side of
| using or selling such a system.
| [deleted]
| psychiatrist24 wrote:
| Just don't send your kids to a school that uses such technology,
| and don't work for employers that use it.
|
| If you cry for regulation, it is a sign that government has too
| much power. But more regulation gives governments even more
| power.
|
| Make sure that your citizens have basic rights. Obviously being
| judged by an algorithm can not make for fair laws. Governments
| can use algorithms for their assessments, but their has to be a
| line of appeal.
| duxup wrote:
| >Just don't send your kids to a school that uses such
| technology
|
| It's not really a realistic option for most people.
|
| Many folks just can't change schools at will. They simply don't
| have that kind of flexibility in their life / options.
| psychiatrist24 wrote:
| So expend some effort to change schools. Why does everything
| have to be handed to you on a silver platter?
| duxup wrote:
| That's also not an option for people, can you imagine that?
|
| I feel like we're going down one of those "I'm not sure how
| to tell you that other people's lives aren't as simple as
| you make them out to be." kind of conversation.
| psychiatrist24 wrote:
| Schools are already shit in many ways. What is your
| answer to that? Just wait out the years and hope for the
| right politicians to be elected and change it? They might
| give your kids diversity training and teach them they are
| unworthy scum. They might deny evolution theory. They
| will mess up your kids. And all you say is "nothing I can
| do"?
|
| I never said it is simple. You still live in a free
| country, though. What on earth could deprive you of all
| options?
| duxup wrote:
| >What on earth could deprive you of all options?
|
| Time, Money?
|
| You're idea here about what options are available to
| people is strange to me. You know people's options to do
| things in life are limited by a variety of factors right?
| psychiatrist24 wrote:
| Time and money can be managed. If you don't have enough
| money, look for a better job (it might help against the
| time issues, too).
|
| To change schools, you might have to move anyway, so you
| might as well look for a job somewhere else.
|
| If you really have no other options, then maybe AI that
| detects emotions is the least important of your worries.
| duxup wrote:
| Yeah that's the kind of hand waving problems away that I
| kind feared. I'm not sure you've got the perspective to
| really understand what some folks are dealing with in
| life if you can just so easily hand wave so many things.
| psychiatrist24 wrote:
| I rather consider your kind of argument to be hand wavy.
| "Some people simply have no options or opportunities
| whatsoever". Can you provide some actual examples? And
| what is even the point to talk about those hypothetical
| people? Since nothing can be done, their situation can
| never ever change, there is no point in discussing it.
|
| Yes there may be some people who are too sick to work.
| Everybody else can go look for another job. And the ones
| who are too sick to work probably have other people
| taking care of their kids already. So those other people
| can go look for another job.
| DC1350 wrote:
| Just get more money 4Head
| psychiatrist24 wrote:
| 4Head??
| Frost1x wrote:
| Shopping privatized policy through your wallet/feet just
| doesn't work. It requires critical mass from consumers and the
| largest portion of consumers will not, or perhaps are in
| situations where they cannot, resist with their feet/wallet.
|
| I'll take more powerful democratic government over more
| powerful unchecked privatized (authoriatian) power any day of
| the week. I'd be happy if _both_ had less concentrated power
| and citizens had significantly more power.
|
| The way to give citizens power is through law that is clearly
| and explicitly designed to empower average citizens against
| both government and private wealth. We have a fair amount of
| such protection built into our governmental system that does
| just this for citizens with respect to government (after all,
| this sort of authoriatian tyranny is one of the reasons we have
| the US now). We have significantly less clear and explicit law
| that protects citizens (consumers) from concentrated private
| wealth (businesses), giving private wealth a massive grey zone
| of unscrupulous space to play around in.
| psychiatrist24 wrote:
| This is not an issue of concentrated private wealth. Most
| schools are run by governments.
|
| You are right, citizens need to be empowered against their
| governments. But regulations give governments more power, not
| less.
|
| And if you say the majority of consumers doesn't care about
| some issue, what makes you think democracy could provide a
| solution?
|
| You also don't need that many feet to create an alternative
| school. You just need enough children to justify an extra
| building and teachers, or supplement the home schooling.
| _Microft wrote:
| Funny, my view as European is that governments are the only
| entities powerful enough to actually keep companies in check.
| Without them, companies would do to you whatever they would
| like.
| Lhd wrote:
| have you considered that perhaps companies and governments
| are together on this?ok, governments do slow down things and
| come up with regulations here and there (if they decide to).
| Imo, at the end of the day, they both play on the same
| team...
| _Microft wrote:
| Call me a sweet summer child but I actually believe that
| our (German) government is still by the people and for the
| people.
| psychiatrist24 wrote:
| I'm also an European, and I disagree strongly. Not everybody
| in Europe is a socialist.
|
| The only thing that guarantees fair treatment is competition
| (so that for example a worker can quit and work somewhere
| else). Government rules just breed corruption and
| inefficiency that harms everybody.
| harles wrote:
| There's a lot of throwing things at the wall and seeing what
| sticks in this article. It also conflates things in its
| comparisons, like comparing AI to pharmaceuticals. We don't
| ingest algorithms and a much better comparison would be to a non
| FDA regulated lab test, many of which exist.
|
| The lie detector comparison is also odd. We never regulated lie
| detectors, we simply barred their use in courtrooms because their
| results are unreliable. This is I think the core issue I have
| with articles like this - if we talk about regulation, we should
| talk about regulating outcomes, not underlying tech. There was no
| talk of regulating skin conductivity devices after polygraphs
| were barred from evidence.
| antwananeer wrote:
| AI has been playing human straight out of my brain into my
| friend's devices
| arc-in-space wrote:
| The focus on lack of evidence for effectiveness here seems
| plainly wrong.
| ling3 wrote:
| Thinking through the consequences of this type of technology is
| important, but the narrative of "we can no longer allow
| technology X to go unregulated" as a vague catch-all for every
| negative externality is unhelpful. Regulate how? What concrete
| solutions is the author suggesting?
| CivBase wrote:
| Agreed. What even counts as "AI that interprets human
| emotions"? Is a suggestion algorithm designed to maximize
| clicks "interpreting human emotions"?
| Verdex wrote:
| I find this to be an interesting statement. What happens if
| you're able to evade regulation by making your "AI that
| interprets human emotions" of really poor quality.
|
| "Your honor, we investigated the source code and discovered
| that there was technically no AI being utilized. It was a
| poorly formatted series of if-statements. Honestly, I
| wouldn't even consider this a program. How it avoids crashing
| the moment it's run is beyond me."
|
| Like, does AI mean some statistical method is used? That
| large data sets were used? Are you using some declarative
| language like prolog?
|
| Ultimately the only definition I can see them coming to will
| reduce to "person uses computer to do thing I don't like."
| And somehow I don't think that's going to actually help.
| visarga wrote:
| > Regulate how? What concrete solutions is the author
| suggesting?
|
| A small group of activists could volunteer to be our ethical
| conscience. They prefer story telling and emotional appeal to
| logic, and being warriors all day long, are very tired of
| everyone else not understanding. And we can't understand unless
| we go through the same ideological retraining they have, so
| anything we do is by default failing to reach them. But since
| they know better, it should be their job anyway to give us the
| ethical approval. /s
| challengly wrote:
| That's the problem. Those who most want to do that job are
| the ones who will abuse it the most.
| adamrezich wrote:
| > Regulate how?
|
| make a committee to vote to fund a study to create a
| subcommittee to vote to fund a study on something from a decade
| ago with a small, non-representative sample size, reaching
| predetermined conclusions that justify the need for the
| committee and all related subcommittees, instead of getting
| anything done.
|
| y'know, government.
| Hizonner wrote:
| Well, _I_ suggest an outright total ban on anything that
| purports to read people 's emotions. Either it doesn't work, in
| which case it shouldn't be used, or it _does_ work, in which
| case it shouldn 't be used.
| visarga wrote:
| The funny thing is that by totally banning "anything that
| purports to read people's emotions" you also ban research
| that would help people. For example you need to train models
| to detect race in order to make sure there are no racial
| biases in another model you want to deploy.
| Verdex wrote:
| People can read other people's emotions. You can build a
| mechanical turk program that's effectively the same as having
| a personal concierge agent with respect to the regulation.
|
| Like, if you ban reading people's emotions you effectively
| have to also ban any human interaction.
| Hizonner wrote:
| It's still completely reasonable to ban automating it. The
| impact of having it done in an automated way is completely
| different from the impact of having it done on a person-to-
| person basis, for a lot of reasons, starting with scale.
|
| It's also reasonable to ban anything that claims to be
| _better_ at it than a human.
| Verdex wrote:
| I don't think it's completely reasonable to ban it.
| Although, I would agree that it's completely reasonable
| to restrict nearly anything.
|
| Although, I do like your comment about scale. If you have
| a system that's 99% successful, then if you apply it to
| everyone in the US then you're failing 3 million people.
| That's a problem.
|
| Of course, your system might be mechanical OR it might
| just be a group of people each one just "doing their
| job." From a result oriented point of view, you might end
| up with a mechanical system that oppresses less people
| than a people system.
|
| I don't feel good about either one, but I also don't feel
| good about causing wide scale misery because at least
| it's people screwing over other people instead of a
| machine screwing over people.
|
| [Of course it's worth noting that I don't trust the
| technology at all. It's just that I also don't trust the
| human solution that it claims it can replace.]
| mitchdoogle wrote:
| The problem is making assumptions about why people are
| experiencing certain emotions, or telling people they are
| wrong when they say, "I'm actually not angry"
| Verdex wrote:
| Yes, but this can happen just as easily with human actors
| as it can with non-human actors.
|
| I suppose the benefit of a human actor is that you can
| theoretically fine or jail them if they're found to be
| malicious or sufficiently incompetent.
|
| However, on the other hand, human actors can explain why
| they're doing the right thing. Even when they are in fact
| doing the wrong thing. An AI that is broken
| incomprehensibly can still be determined to be broken.
| The human actor causing issues can produce very
| convincing arguments to avoid termination. Also they can
| bring in donuts every Thursday to stay on the bottom of
| the termination list.
|
| [And to be clear. I don't trust the technology at all. I
| just also don't trust the human system either. A system
| isn't better because innocent people are oppressed by
| humans instead of by a computer.]
| adrianmonk wrote:
| Suppose there's a browser plugin that uses sentiment analysis
| on text fields to try to detect text written in anger. And it
| doesn't do anything with the information except warn you so
| you can think twice before posting an angry comment to social
| media or sending an angry email. Should that be illegal?
|
| Or maybe it more directly tries to sense emotion by using
| your webcam to look at your facial expression.
| Hizonner wrote:
| > Should that be illegal?
|
| That would be acceptable collateral damage, if it couldn't
| be permitted without opening the door for the creation of
| systems that used the information against the analyzed
| people's interests.
|
| I'd be willing to at least consider a carefully crafted
| exception. The problem being that when you write such an
| exception, it tends to be awfully easy to introduce
| loopholes that, in practice, allow using uninformed pseudo-
| consent, or false consent with no real alternative
| available, to use information against people.
| PeterisP wrote:
| The thing is, if you include something like that (i.e.
| sentiment analysis as crude, rudimentary way of looking
| at people's emotions), the genie is out of the bottle -
| it's a widespread task that's used as a relatively simple
| homework excercise in undergrad courses, you would need
| to censor it out of textbooks worldwide, which is a quite
| big issue to say at least.
|
| I.e. my point is that such a ban would have to be _very_
| extensive and invasive, with obvious censorship of small,
| simple segments of code and whole avenues of basic
| knowledge. Given some data, you can get a crude emotion
| detector from facial images or text messages - not state
| of art but somewhat accurate - with something like ten
| lines of code, with no previous skill on "emotion
| analysis", just applying generic ML approaches. I can't
| imagine how such a ban could be implemented, as so many
| people would still be able to easily make such systems
| whenever they wanted to, so the ban wouldn't be
| effective.
|
| Perhaps you could regulate the application of automated
| decision making to decisions about people and requiring
| some review-and-override mechanisms (GDPR has some
| limited aspects of that), but it's a very different area
| than just banning knowledge and skills that already exist
| and are relatively widespread.
| unishark wrote:
| Suppose someone, for example a depressed person, wants to use
| it to monitor their emotional state and use various automated
| responses like notifications or distractions to help maintain
| an emotional state they want?
| causalmodels wrote:
| I think this viewpoint is limited. Sometimes reading peoples'
| emotions can be an extremely good thing.
|
| I am aware of a healthcare company which currently has a
| model in production which alerts healthcare providers if a
| person displays suicidal intent. They have several confirmed
| instances deaths being prevented because of the interventions
| taken due to alerts from their model. While I don't think ML
| should be used to manipulate people's emotional states, I
| think this is a case where having a model that can read
| people's emotions is a good thing.
| esalman wrote:
| I think what the author is suggesting is that decision making,
| especially those which can critically affect a person, should
| not be automated by machines. There must be a mechanism in
| place which is open to scrutiny (preferably by a qualified
| human) and accountability.
|
| Take the example of predicting terrorism threats based on
| facial queues of stress or fear. Machines lack context, which a
| qualified human would otherwise take into consideration. You
| can be stressed out because you might be accompanying a child,
| or fearful that you might miss a flight. If a TSA agent deports
| someone simply because a machine recommended it, that would be
| inhumane.
|
| People like to argue that more regulation will adversely affect
| automation and/or growth/scaling of technologies and
| businesses. Growth is important but it must not cost us our
| humanity.
| Verdex wrote:
| Personally, I think this type of thing falls into what I like
| to call the "all problems are management problems" category.
|
| If a TSA agent deports someone simply because the machine
| recommended it, then that _is_ a problem. But if a TSA agent
| deports someone simply because they were having a bad day,
| then that is _also_ a problem.
|
| I guess I don't care what tools those in authority are using
| (their intuition or a mechanical intuition or a database
| lookup), but what I care about is whether or not innocent
| people without the ability to navigate an appeal system are
| being erroneously penalized.
|
| And ultimately, it's the responsibility of management to make
| sure that the people/tools they assign are doing a good job.
| If they fail, then management needs to find new people/tools.
| If management fails to do that, then all the AI regulation in
| the world isn't going to do much good.
| esalman wrote:
| Well, the purpose of the AI regulation is specifically to
| hold the "management" accountable when they fail to prevent
| misuse of the technology. The regulations are to be enacted
| by the lawmakers. As I see it, the debates like the one we
| are having right now will determine how the regulation will
| be shaped eventually.
| Verdex wrote:
| Yes, but I'm worried about the people component of my
| "people/tool" equation. If management sees that costly
| fines occur when AI is used, then maybe they'll abandon
| it and just use people instead.
|
| However, if they hire a bunch of power hungry sociopaths
| who are very good at hiding their malicious oppression
| and who also bring in donuts every Thursday to stay on
| their bosses good side, then the situation could easily
| lead to worse outcomes for the people who have to deal
| with this system.
|
| If we create a computer system that oppresses 1% of
| innocent people, then that _is_ a problem. However, I don
| 't consider it a win to ban the computer system and
| replace it with a human system that oppresses 10% of
| innocent people. Like, the situation isn't better because
| humans are oppressing humans instead of a computer doing
| the oppression.
|
| That's why I was focused on management. I don't care that
| things are going badly for some specific technology
| related reason. It's management's job to fix it
| regardless. If management can't rely on the technology
| for regulatory reasons, then they might rely on people
| who do just as bad of a job. And hey, that scenario is
| even better for management because if they hire a bad
| actor _who gets caught_ then that person faces the
| consequences and not them.
| visarga wrote:
| Maybe we're going to develop a specialised court system for
| AI where humans can sue for AI-related injustice. I don't
| trust companies to self regulate effectively.
| harles wrote:
| We haven't needed such courts for computers, the
| internet, or other algorithms. I fail to see how special
| courts are needed for AI. Our current legal system
| appears perfectly suited for AI - at least no worse than
| for other tech.
| visarga wrote:
| > decision making ... should not be automated by machines.
| There must be a mechanism in place which is open to scrutiny
| (preferably by a qualified human) and accountability
|
| You're saying "I don't trust AI, I want human supervision",
| but this works both ways. Sometimes we don't trust the humans
| and would prefer a neutral AI. Humans do terrible things to
| other humans. Who's going to review my appeals? What are
| their biases? Are they any more trustworthy than a model?
| dj_mc_merlin wrote:
| The author is not writing down action items after a meeting.
| It's the job of politicians (presumably) to draft up policy.
| Activism groups also push for specific regulation sometimes.
|
| But stating your policy opens up another angle of attack: those
| who wish to undermine your ideas can attack your implementation
| rather than the concept.
| pc86 wrote:
| It's at best sloppy to just say "this needs to be regulated,
| but I can't be bothered to suggest even one possible
| regulation that would fix anything I find so objectionable."
| The author has a doctorate and works at Microsoft Research
| _on AI_. If she thinks it should be regulated (which is
| absolutely a fair position to take) I 'd much rather have her
| be the one suggesting regulations than some 80 year old
| lawyer who's been in Congress since the civil rights era or
| some special interest lobbyist.
| dj_mc_merlin wrote:
| Her understanding of AI does not translate to an
| understanding of how a society runs or how laws should be
| made. If anything, many people overgeneralize their
| expertise at one task to suggest bad solutions to problems
| from other domains. Especially engineers and PhDs.
|
| I agree that she's still better than most US politicians. I
| have some faith in politicians from Western Europe to do
| half the correct thing, or at least not be swayed by
| arguments coming from money too much. Not that much faith,
| but still..
| Verdex wrote:
| > those who wish to undermine your ideas can attack your
| implementation rather than the concept.
|
| Yeah, it's frustrating when people do this. But if you want
| to have real solution at the end of the day, then you'll need
| to hammer out all of your implementation issues.
|
| If you produce an implementation that is flawed, then people
| will be able to evade the spirit of your regulation rendering
| it useless.
| mustafa_pasi wrote:
| Looks like they reinvented the polygraph with the same exact set
| of problems.
| jplr8922 wrote:
| Are the people in charge of regulating the AI which interprets
| human emotions better than the AI at the same task? How do we
| currently regulate humans that interpret other humans emotions?
| Fairly easy to point a case where AI did poorly. Much harder to
| compare the current process to the new one. Humans can be
| assholes too.
| crazygringo wrote:
| I have read a huge swathe of academic literature on classifying
| and recognizing emotions.
|
| And the fact is that _humans_ can 't reliably identify emotions
| from photographs, so there's zero chance for AI.
|
| While I don't agree with much of what she writes, the
| psychologist Lisa Feldman Barrett gives an excellent overview of
| why at the start of her book "How Emotions are Made".
|
| But a short explanation is that 1) emotions are expressed not
| just with the face but with the whole body, 2) the expression of
| emotion is a sequence of changes over time that can't be captured
| in a single frame, 3) there is extreme overlap in the expression
| of emotions (e.g. a seemingly grimaced look could either be
| painful anguish or ecstatic surprise) and 4) while we do have
| instinctual expressions for emotions (smile/frown/etc.), we learn
| culturally how and when to hide, show, fake, or otherwise modify
| these by habit, as well as consciously do so for our immediate
| purposes.
|
| So we humans obviously _do_ recognize emotions in others, but we
| do so with a huge variety of cues, we still frequently get it
| wrong, and we do a far better job when we share the same culture,
| and also know the individual person well. (Think how some people
| express anger with aggressive shouting, others by silently
| withdrawing.)
|
| Most evidence for the idea that emotions _can_ be identified (and
| cross-culturally) comes from the research of Paul Ekman, but this
| was limited to 6 "basic" emotions with photographs of highly
| exaggerated/stylized faces performed by actors. It has no
| relevance to whether real-life, non-"staged" emotions can be
| reliably detected.
|
| So any AI products designed to supposedly recognize emotions are
| necessarily snake oil. I assume they _are_ reliably measuring
| facial expressions, but facial expressions simply _cannot_ be
| mapped to actual emotions in _any_ kind of reliable way in the
| real world.
| lacker wrote:
| _Any AI products designed to supposedly recognize emotions are
| necessarily snake oil._
|
| You are making far too extreme a judgment here. You also say
| humans cannot "reliably" identify emotions from photographs.
| This is just setting the bar far too high. Humans can quite
| often identify emotions from photographs. It's far better than
| random chance and you shouldn't call this level of performance
| "snake oil".
|
| You can criticize AI emotion detection as likely to lead to
| some sort of dystopia, but saying it can't possibly work is
| just going to lead you to an incorrect analysis of the
| situation.
| dheera wrote:
| Also, it's conceivable for a machine learning algorithm to
| surpass humans in certain aspects, e.g.
|
| - Identifying emotions of humans who grew up in a different
| culture, for which the ML algorithm may have piles of data
| from every part of the world and you don't
|
| - Identifying emotions of babies based on instinctual
| behavior
|
| - Identifying emotions of people who are undergoing a trauma
| response that most humans are not trained to recognize
|
| - Identifying emotions of people during a negotiation process
| in which the people are actively trying to hide their
| emotions from humans but nevertheless leak certain signs of
| their true emotions
| crazygringo wrote:
| > _This is just setting the bar far too high... It 's far
| better than random chance_
|
| I don't think it is setting the bar too high, "far better
| than random" can still be abysmal.
|
| You're right that humans are better than _random_ , but there
| is a _wide_ range of emotions. Assume for the sake of
| argument there are 10 emotions to identify and evenly
| distributed in frequency, then random is getting it right 10%
| of the time. Let 's say humans get it right 30% of the time
| from still photographs of real-life situations (not staged)
| -- I'm making this specific number up but depending on the
| type of experiment, it's a reasonable ballpark one.
|
| That's still _horribly low_ , wrong more than half the time.
| I can't think of any situation where that could warrant any
| kind of responsible decision-making. If we were talking 95%
| accuracy then there could be value, I'm not asking for 99.99%
| accuracy. But if reliable detection is something like 30%, I
| stand by calling this "snake oil" even if it's not just
| random.
| visarga wrote:
| I don't think there's a big industry of still image emotion
| detection. It's not the smartest approach. I think it would
| be necessary to use video for this task.
| Fernicia wrote:
| If you agree that AI can reach human levels of accuracy is
| your point that we shouldn't ever try to assess someone's
| emotion in decision making, whether it's a person or
| machine deciding?
| jcelerier wrote:
| > is your point that we shouldn't ever try to assess
| someone's emotion in decision making, whether it's a
| person or machine deciding?
|
| isn't that a pretty sane and basic assumption ?
| crazygringo wrote:
| In the context of _labeling emotions based on context-
| free still images of strangers_ , then yes humans are so
| inaccurate at this it would generally be a bad idea to
| assess emotions.
|
| In the context of real life, where we know people, are
| interacting with them, and are reading cues from their
| whole body and their movement over time, then we're much
| better at assessing emotions and we'd be pretty foolish
| to ignore emotional signals.
| uyt wrote:
| We seem to have evolved to display emotion because it's a
| useful communication tool. So much that in text based
| communication where a lot of emotion is lost, we explicitly re-
| insert emote-icons to make it clear again.
|
| So emotions can be thought as a language (albeit a pretty lossy
| one). If AI can one day understand spoken/written language, I
| don't see why it can't also understand the language of
| emotions.
| vilhelm_s wrote:
| I think these objects are maybe true but not relevant.
|
| The leading example of the article was about Zooom videos, not
| single frames, and in a school setting you presumably know what
| culture the students are from, so I don't think you need it to
| work cross-culturally. And I don't doubt that people can
| deliberately hide their emotions, but many settings are not
| adversarial, so there would be no reason to do so. E.g., if you
| imagine that a teacher is teaching a lecture to a large
| audience over zoom and is using a "puzzlement meter" to see if
| they seem to be getting it, then any audience member who does
| feel puzzled will only gain from frowning and making the
| lecturer slow down.
|
| In general, I think from my experience talking to people over
| video chat, some emotional information does get communicated
| over the video, so in principle computer programs should be
| able to pick up on it too.
| crazygringo wrote:
| > _about Zooom videos, not single frames_
|
| The products in question are almost certainly assessing still
| frames from video. There's been vanishingly little research
| on the time component of emotions, even though we know it's
| hugely important.
|
| > _you need it to work cross-culturally_
|
| This would then require separate training models for e.g.
| individual subcultures within countries as well as detecting
| which subcultures participants belong to. That is also far
| beyond anything being done currently.
|
| > _but many settings are not adversarial, so there would be
| no reason to do so_
|
| It has nothing to do with an adversarial setting, people try
| to hide their emotions _constantly_. They hide that they 're
| fed up with their boss in front of colleagues, they hide that
| they're stressed with their spouse at work, they hide that
| they're worried the project will fail. We are emotionally
| regulating virtually all the time.
|
| > _some emotional information does get communicated over the
| video, so in principle computer programs should be able to
| pick up on it too_
|
| In principle, yes, but in practice the emotional content is
| _so_ dependent upon your cultural and individual mental model
| of the person that you would need to model their entire
| psychology. "What does that long pause mean?" The point is
| that emotional signals are so _incredibly_ complex and vary
| so much from person to person, that the difficulty of
| accurately decoding emotions is more akin to AI that can make
| conceptual inferences and hold a genuinely intelligent
| conversation, as opposed to mere pattern recognition.
| ianai wrote:
| Further, I've had people over-analyze my every expression to
| the point of abuse plenty of times. It is entirely possible to
| wind up with unneeded hostility from trying to infer emotional
| states.
|
| I wish people and machines would Not try to infer too much from
| this sort of thing. Treat people as ends in themselves.
| pessimizer wrote:
| Also, emotions aren't necessarily a thing as such; they're at
| least sometimes a retroactive interpretation of physical
| reactions (sympathetic and parasympathetic nervous system
| activation.)
|
| i.e. you know you got a rush, then by examining context, you
| attach a ( _theory-theory_ ) word to that rush. Both AI and
| photographs are bad at context.
| dwighttk wrote:
| FWIW and I'm not an AI and this is a much smaller question...
|
| But there was a little test that ran around a few years back
| that was just "Is this smile genuine or not" and I was able to
| identify 20 out of 20 pictures real and fake smiles.
|
| The pictures were gathered by asking subjects to smile and then
| taking the picture or taking a picture after they responded to
| a joke, so I guess there is still room for some of the
| "genuine" smiles to be faked.
| crazygringo wrote:
| Well, that's actually relatively easy if you know what you're
| looking for -- real smiles are known as "Duchenne smiles" and
| involve contraction of eye muscles. And that could
| _absolutely_ be done by AI today, relatively easily.
|
| The issue is the emotion behind it... you can be quite happy
| without smiling at all, and people who pose for the camera
| all day long learn to give a 100% convincing Duchenne smile
| no matter how they're feeling that day.
| goatcode wrote:
| > And the fact is that humans can't reliably identify emotions
| from photographs, so there's zero chance for AI.
|
| I believe there are a lot of examples of AI doing things that
| humans can't. Typically it's a matter of scale, but sometimes
| it's a matter of some correlations being beyond the basic
| capabilities of humans. I could be wrong, but I'm not sure that
| this is the best metric for whether AI could do something.
| bartleby_ wrote:
| This is a common misperception about AI and ML. Most leading
| voices in ML will tell you that--unless you have a very good
| reason to believe differently--ML is not the tool to turn to
| if you need better than human accuracy. That also comports
| with my experience in the field over the last 6 years.
| OrderlyTiamat wrote:
| What do you mean by this? This seems like a vast sweeping
| generalization. There are lots of areas where ML already
| outperforms human accuracy with open and available tools,
| are you saying these should be avoided unless there is a
| very good reason to use them?
| crazygringo wrote:
| First, you need reliable training data to begin with. This
| can't be supplied by third-party labeling of faces, so it
| would need to be done with a dataset of self-reported
| emotions, but self-reported emotions also have tons of
| pitfalls well documented in the literature.
|
| But second, the correlations of individual facial muscle
| contractions with emotions has been extensively studied and
| it's far noisier, inconsistent, or completely devoid of a
| signal than many people assume. In academic terms there's no
| such thing as a reliable emotional "signature" to be gleaned
| from facial muscle activation.
|
| So the point is, it appears that the raw data simply isn't
| there for the AI to detect patterns that humans can't.
| Detecting emotions _requires_ far more data points _outside_
| of facial muscle activation -- such as the ones I listed.
| unishark wrote:
| Your argument is basically that since something is hard it
| is impossible?
| neolog wrote:
| > self-reported emotions also have tons of pitfalls well
| documented in the literature
|
| That's interesting. Where can I read about these issues?
| visarga wrote:
| Unsupervised learning is really good today, about 1-2%
| under supervised learning. You can also cross correlate
| text, audio and video. If there's signal in the data, then
| a model can learn it, and you don't need so many labels.
| wizzwizz4 wrote:
| The signal is facial expressions. You're missing the "map
| facial expressions to emotions" step.
| visarga wrote:
| > So any AI products designed to supposedly recognize emotions
| are necessarily snake oil.
|
| Please consult the current state of AI before giving an a
| priori rebuttal. Emotions can also be detected in text, voice
| and video, not just in static images. Sentiment detection in
| text is widely used.
|
| The premise of the article is valid, whenever AI systems are
| being deployed they need to be ethically vetted, but the
| writing is superficial and 'too emotional'.
| bumby wrote:
| > _the fact is that humans can 't reliably identify emotions
| from photographs_
|
| As a layman, I had previously thought Paul Ekman's work refuted
| this claim, but it seems like it's been called into question.
| (Ekman was reportedly the basis for the main character in the
| show _Lie to Me_ )
|
| https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-020-00507-5
| Wistar wrote:
| I have certainly been surprised by the question, "Are you mad?"
| from people who know me very well and have completely misread
| my emotion. And that's in person.
| mLuby wrote:
| > And the fact is that humans can't reliably identify emotions
| from photographs, so there's zero chance for AI.
|
| The second doesn't necessarily follow from the first--there are
| plenty of things humans are bad at that computers are good at.
|
| You are probably right that current products aren't very
| capable, and may even be snake oil.
|
| But also I'd be quite surprised if this _isn 't_ possible in
| the near future.
| Tagbert wrote:
| Static photos are inadequate for interpreting emotions. There
| is no context and context is critical for understanding
| emotions.
|
| What was the situation? What expressions was the person making
| in the previous moments. As you said, body language. How the
| person relates to the viewer.
|
| A video clip would be better but still would miss a lot.
| tablespoon wrote:
| > So any AI products designed to supposedly recognize emotions
| are necessarily snake oil. I assume they are reliably measuring
| facial expressions, but facial expressions simply cannot be
| mapped to actual emotions in any kind of reliable way in the
| real world.
|
| Unfortunately snake oil is a profitable business, and
| unreliability isn't going to stop people from selling and using
| these systems.
|
| It's going to be like AI-driven captchas [1], the people
| subjected to these systems are going to have to learn to give
| the systems the answers they want, even if it's obvious they're
| incorrect. You'll have students concentrating on expressing an
| "attentive" face rather than concentrating on the material.
|
| [1] Yes, I'm talking about you reCAPTCHA. Highway buzz strips
| aren't crosswalks.
| bitL wrote:
| AI can work on real-time videos (see "ancient" techniques with
| C3D). A single photograph is noisy, a bunch of photographs
| close spatiotemporally are much more decisive.
| NwtnsMthd wrote:
| > It maps facial features to assign each pupil's emotional state
| into a category such as happiness, sadness, anger, disgust,
| surprise and fear.
|
| Is boredom an emotional state? It's probably worth including,
| considering the setting.
|
| Coworkers that I've worked with for years will still occasionally
| ask me if I'm stressed or angry. Apparently that's what I look
| like in deep concentrating, even if I'm totally relaxed and
| otherwise happy. If a mild case of RBF can throw humans off how
| easy would it be for an AI to miss-judge?
|
| Which raises the question, why is anyone even considering AI to
| judge emotional state? For what purpose?
| arafa wrote:
| As mentioned in the article, it's because it's based off of
| Paul Ekman's facial recognition work (FACS), which infers a
| person's emotional state based on their facial expression. The
| only reliable markers Ekman found were for those 6 emotions
| (and contempt and perhaps 1-2 others). I haven't heard of any
| for boredom
|
| The misattribution of anger you're describing is pretty common,
| I think. I'm guessing it's because you furrow your brow in deep
| concentration (and possibly tense your lower eyelids), which is
| also common in anger faces. The real giveaway here should be
| the missing upper eyelid raise (and possible pupil dilation)
| that you won't be doing but should be there if you're angry.
| People and AIs that are trained with good visibility of your
| face shouldn't make these errors very often.
|
| Our biology is hardwired to communicate the emotions we're
| feeling via our face. We want other people to know how we're
| feeling because it's important. It could be misused, though
| (Ekman's FACS work with airport security to detect lies was a
| failure).
| HPsquared wrote:
| It's quite hard to reliably determine human emotions. To quote
| David Ogilvy:
|
| "People don't think what they feel, don't say what they think,
| and don't do what they say."
| bsenftner wrote:
| "AI" that interprets human emotion is fraud. There is no means to
| determine the inner state of an individual short of asking them,
| and then filtering for situational context. Unless you're talking
| about strapping a portable fMRI machine to the subject's head,
| it's not possible to determine the emotional state of another
| individual.
|
| And for the point, I've worked with Ekman. This sub-field is not
| scientifically possible.
| grenoire wrote:
| Won't stop snake oil salesmen from advertising such models and
| profit off of them. A substantial portion of the detrimental
| effects will be shared, regardless of the validity of the
| algorithm.
| bsenftner wrote:
| As an industry of computer SCIENTISTS, we should make the
| statement that such systems are not possible and fraud.
| quotemstr wrote:
| But such systems _are_ possible and _aren 't_ necessarily
| fraud. You'd prefer that reality be other than what it is.
| I get it. You don't want these systems to work. But they
| _do_ , and a noble lie saying they don't is still a lie.
|
| Do you really not think it's possible to read emotions from
| facial expressions? If humans can do it, a machine can do
| it better. The claim from the article that machines can't
| read emotions is pure motivated reasoning so distorted and
| disconnected from reality that it amounts to fraud. It's
| obviously the case that faces convey emotions. Look around.
| bsenftner wrote:
| As if none of you are aware of actors and method actors
| that will and do fool any system observing them
| externally. Identifying the inner emotional state of a
| 3rd person is not possible, no matter how much you want
| it to be.
| quotemstr wrote:
| Most people most of the time aren't acting. Facial
| expressions are great Bayesian indications of emotional
| state.
| mordymoop wrote:
| Looking at a person's face gives me Bayesian evidence about
| their emotional state, nudging my beliefs in a direction. AIs
| would be even better at this, given access to not just more
| data but also superhuman abilities such as detecting heart rate
| by watching the target's throat.
| ben_w wrote:
| To the extent that "no means" is true, surely it's also true of
| humans trying to judge the emotional state of other humans?
|
| Not denying the snake oil _currently_ in the sector as a whole,
| but I think the tech should _eventually_ be able to do anything
| our minds can do.
| bsenftner wrote:
| But your mind cannot identify the emotional state of a
| professional actor. People are far more sophisticated than
| this immature and naively conceived technology.
| PeterisP wrote:
| A system (or human) does not need to be perfect to be
| useful. I'll definitely assert that my mind can identify
| the emotional state of humans around me even if it's not
| always correct about it and can be cheated by a
| professional actor; it's right more often than not and it's
| a very useful capability to have so I'd say it works
| because I'm using it all the time even if's not perfect.
|
| It would be fraud if and only if it's no better than
| chance, if it has no correlation whatsoever with the true
| emotional state - and it's perfectly possible (by both
| humans and machines) to make an "educated guess" about the
| emotional state that would - especially in agregate for
| many humans - be informative for all kinds of purposes,
| even if it can be easily cheated by a professional actor.
| For example, you probably can detect if a particular
| section of an online class turns people unusually
| frustrated or unusually sleepy, even if it doesn't affect
| all people, half of affected people don't show it or aren't
| detected, and there's a professional actor in the class
| faking the exactly opposite signal. Also, there are many
| scenarios where it's not even worth considering
| antagonistic behavior, where people have no motivation to
| put any effort in misleading it.
|
| The argument that it's impossible to determine the inner
| state of an individual _with certainty_ is irrelevant,
| because noone is claiming that, and it 's not a requirement
| for the described use cases. After all, surveys of "do you
| like product/person X" provide valuable information even if
| it's trivial for anyone surveyed to lie. All the system
| needs to do (which needs to be properly validated, of
| course) is to provide some metric that in practice turns
| out to be reasonably correlated with the inner state of the
| individual, even if it doesn't work in all cases and for
| all individuals, and that IMHO is definitely achievable.
|
| Perhaps it's more a difference in semantics - what do we
| call if a system (or human) for identifying some status or
| truth is halfway between "no better than chance" and "can
| identify the true status 100% of the time". I would say
| that it's a feasible system for identifying that thing, and
| that system works (though it's not perfect); it seems that
| you would say that such a system does not work - but how
| _would_ you call or describe such a halfway-accurate
| system?
| daverol wrote:
| Of course one can try it out to see if it needs regulating:
| https://emojify.info
| gspr wrote:
| Are you telling me that you need an fMRI to relatively reliably
| classify 100 people into two classes based on whether they're
| very happy or in great despair?
| Mauricebranagh wrote:
| Lets also add Opaque HR processes like Performance Reviews /
| Stack ranking to the List.
|
| I swear when I worked for BT it took 6 months for people to get
| over those ghastly pdp 121's - The system was fiddled to give
| everyone as low a pay rise as possible.
| xeroxling wrote:
| Extreme point of view for a technology that hasn't been developed
| yet. Why kill something, when's not even alive lol
| duxup wrote:
| I feel like AI is pointed AT us rather than working FOR / WITH us
| more often than not.
|
| I want to make interesting / meaningful choices / have input. But
| none of the stuff (advertising, etc) really ask me to do so. I
| get amazon ads for things I bought... but not a single thing on
| any of my wish lists (how much more explicit can I get?)
|
| But rather there's all this AI effort to get ME to do a thing...
| for someone else, and seemingly so they can be lazy. Want to
| engage with your employees? Talk to them, engage with them, earn
| their trust. I suspect it will pay off way better than some wonky
| software.
|
| All these efforts seem to be without my input, without bothering
| to ask, just let the computer tell them and somehow that makes
| decisions that should have my input without me.
|
| How about some AI with some engagement, where i can have input,
| tell them "yeah man that was a good recommendation", "no way that
| was way off", or as far as the mood stuff goes "not now but maybe
| later thanks"?
| djhn wrote:
| People themselves are one of the least reliable sources you can
| use to determine what it is they actually want.
|
| Proof: purchasing behaviour, life choices, etc.
| duxup wrote:
| I'd believe your proof if somehow there was something to
| compare it to....
|
| In the meantime I get ads for stuff I'm not buying, so I'm
| not sure anyone knows what 'reliable' is.
| Pokepokalypse wrote:
| Ads aren't about reliability. There's a very low cost for
| exposing someone to an ad that won't generate sales. So as
| long as exposing a GROUP of people to that ad DOES generate
| sales, that's going to drive those ads.
| duxup wrote:
| That really doesn't address what I said.
|
| "People themselves are one of the least reliable sources
| you can use to determine what it is they actually want."
|
| I'm not sure the idea that people are bad at predicting
| what they want makes a lot of sense if there's nothing to
| show that they're bad at it.
| scotty79 wrote:
| > How about some AI with some engagement, where i can have
| input, tell them "yeah man that was a good recommendation", "no
| way that was way off", or as far as the mood stuff goes "not
| now but maybe later thanks"?
|
| That might be a technical limitation. AI just sucks at dialogs,
| keeping context and adjusting pretrained models.
| duxup wrote:
| My limited understanding seems to indicate that for AI to
| process input it has to be handled / processed carefully for
| any good to come from it.
|
| Accordingly making decisions based on human feedback could be
| super difficult / impossible at the moment.
|
| The result though seems like a super narrow minded system
| that wouldn't know when it is dead wrong ...
| alex_anglin wrote:
| Anecdote time - I use Apple music and am generally happy with
| it. However, some time ago I started putting on the 'Sleep
| Sounds' playlist before going to bed. That's messed up my
| recommendations for my 'New Music Mix,' a more valuable
| feature for me. Even after disliking the 'Sleep Sounds' and
| specifying that it shouldn't recommend more music like it, my
| recommendations are still messed up. Makes one wonder to what
| extent in the age of 'AI' whether everyone is an edge-case in
| some form, particularly when (as you point out) context is a
| big mess.
| duxup wrote:
| Similar anecdote.
|
| I googled some info about a rival college football team. At
| some point Google decided I was a fan of that team an my
| news feeds was flooded with news about that team... and not
| the team I actually follow.
|
| No amount of user input saying 'don't show me this' would
| make it go away for more than a month or two, and
| eventually I just stopped looking at google news and turned
| off the google news feed entirely in android...
|
| Google news, whatever it does has entirely disconnected
| itself from most anything relevant to what I want, to the
| point that it is a negative experience using it compared to
| some random news site.
| zerzera wrote:
| The rival college football team probably had an ad budget
| Google could spend.
| duxup wrote:
| Maybe, but not all the articles were all that positive
| about them, but even so I wouldn't be surprised.
| monkeybutton wrote:
| > I get amazon ads for things I bought... but not a single
| thing on any of my wish lists (how much more explicit can I
| get?)
|
| I can't find the source now but this reminds me of some trivia
| about Netflix recommendations and how people use the "My List"
| feature. Apparently uses will add all the serious and
| "important" films they think they should watch to the list, but
| when it comes to actual viewing those are never the films they
| select to watch. How much of what is on peoples' Amazon wish
| lists are items that will actually ever be bought (vs being
| idly pined for) and are they worth paying to advertise for?
| minikites wrote:
| >I feel like AI is pointed AT us rather than working FOR / WITH
| us more often than not.
|
| That's not AI, that's capitalism. It's not profitable to use AI
| for wholesome and healthy things for people, so nobody does.
| It's more profitable to cram advertisements into every corner
| of our life, it's more profitable to mine our personal
| information and personal friend networks, it's more profitable
| to sell us a service instead of a tool. The next time you're
| upset at how technology is being used, think about who benefits
| and what their politics are, because everything is political.
| beaconstudios wrote:
| you'd be better off thinking of who benefits and what their
| incentives are. Because people by and large are acting based
| on incentives, and if you can reshape the incentive
| structures then you can discourage the action (by opposition
| eg. making it punishable) or remove the incentive altogether
| (through systems interventions).
|
| Blaming it on politics leaves you with no actions to take
| beyond trying to talk people into acting against their
| incentives - which you can do, but it's not easy to get
| people to change their minds en-masse.
| minikites wrote:
| >if you can reshape the incentive structures then you can
| discourage the action
|
| Yes, which is why it's important to be politically
| involved, governments are the ones with power to change
| incentive structures at the scale of large companies or
| society-wide. I do agree with your first paragraph, but
| your second paragraph does not make sense to me, it's not
| "blaming it on politics", politics is the exact mechanism
| to enact the changes you refer to in your first paragraph.
| beaconstudios wrote:
| perhaps we're thinking of politics in different senses -
| it is, after all, quite an overloaded word. I meant
| politics as in people's personal perspective and beliefs
| about the world. I agree that engaging in the politics of
| changing our governance for the better is necessary.
| causalmodels wrote:
| I would like to push back against this a bit. You, along with
| most people in this thread, probably suffer from availability
| bias. People only interact with AI/ML systems when they are
| surfaced to them, and currently the most popular channel to
| surface ML is ads. Of course I have my own biases, but I
| think is an important critique. As Sinclair said, "It is
| difficult to get a man to understand something, when his
| salary depends on his not understanding it."
|
| > It's not profitable to use AI for wholesome and healthy
| things for people, so nobody does
|
| The purpose of the ML systems I build is to detect when
| things go wrong in order to keep people safe. These systems
| are both important and extremely valuable. They just aren't
| quite as sexy as the latest computer vision or large language
| models. But that's ok. Normal people only become aware of
| such systems when things go horribly wrong. It's sort of like
| plumbing in that regard.
| unishark wrote:
| I'd say there's just outright negativity bias in society
| nowadays when it comes to technology.
|
| Even if ads were the biggest use of AI today, a glass-half-
| full view would be that other markets will benefit from the
| AI development done today for ads, as the performance gets
| sufficiently good enough for those fields too.
| dukeyukey wrote:
| > I get amazon ads for things I bought
|
| Any ad engineers here, why does this happen? Amazon knows I
| just bought an office chair from them, they know I'm a
| residential customer and presumably they know I'm not gonna buy
| an office chair every week, so why do they keep advertising
| office chairs to me?
| Darkharbourzz wrote:
| Caveat: I don't work on advertising systems, but I do work in
| ML, and I've studied recommendation systems. One way to think
| about these large systems is that they contain a condensed
| representation of you that is comprised of all the things you
| buy/consume on their platform (the raw data) and some derived
| descriptors (possibly demographic information/information
| from other platforms/"engineered features" like what "style"
| of clothing you like, etc. This representation of you (a
| vector) can be compared to other members of the platform
| (inner product), and they can give you recommendations based
| on your similarity.
|
| The problem is that in this case, they've encoded into your
| condensed representation something about office chairs. A
| better system would be knowledgeable about the kind of
| purchase and infer if it's the kind of thing you would buy
| once, or multiple times.
|
| But then you have the problem of different individuals having
| the propensity to buy different products at varying
| intervals. If I like shoes, I might buy many pairs. You might
| not be into shoes, and so you're not going to buy more than a
| couple pairs, if that. In this case, how do we train a system
| to know the difference between the two of us, with our
| different tastes? The more specific we get with the vector
| descriptor, the harder it is to compare us to other people
| (because in high dimension, random vectors are basically
| orthogonal).
|
| And going through all products and trying to determine if
| they are the kind of thing that you would buy more or less
| of, given that you just bought it, is expensive, and likely
| difficult. The system ultimately falls on a positive
| correlation between history and future purchases.
|
| Another way to think about this is with Bayesian reasoning,
| where your prior likelihood to buy office chairs affects the
| posterior. The system's prior is high (you've bought chairs
| in the past), which scales the posterior (that you'll buy a
| chair now).
| fctorial wrote:
| That means the recommendation system isn't a neural net
| trained on the buying habits of users. It's a simple
| logistics system that recommends items similar to the ones
| you've bought.
| benlivengood wrote:
| Amazon presumably doesn't share purchase history with
| advertisers; you get lumped into a cohort with certain
| interests/keywords.
|
| An experiment to try; if you only go shopping/searching for
| vacuum cleaners but don't actually buy one you are likely to
| see the same phenomenon.
|
| Why do advertisers pay for this? Because conversion
| statistics show that showing ads to people shopping for
| vacuum cleaners do actually result in vacuum cleaner sales.
| A/B tests back up the causality of the results, so vacuum
| sellers pay for the ads.
|
| Why doesn't Amazon remove you from the cohort of vacuum
| cleaner shoppers after you make a purchase? 1) it would
| reveal that you made a purchase. 2) Amazon would lose out on
| additional ad revenue.
|
| I have no inside information on Amazon but it matches what
| I've seen on other large ad networks.
| paulclinger wrote:
| I've been puzzled by the same question (as a reaction to the
| same ads) and it occurred to me that it may be simple math:
|
| If the likelihood of buying by someone who already bought the
| item is 3% and the likelihood of buying by someone else is 1%
| (simply because there are many more people in the second
| category), which group would you focus on with your ads?
|
| Personally, if I like an item, I'll recommend (and gift) it
| to my family and friends. I can think of at least 3 items
| that I bought for myself, liked and bought for someone else
| that are normally more of a long-serving items (like a tea
| kettle or a vacuum).
| Bjartr wrote:
| I can't speak to amazon specifically, but my understanding of
| this phenomena in general, especially with ads that are bid
| for, is that the systems which track and gauge your
| likelihood to purchase aren't connected to the systems that
| know you did make a purchase, at least at the point in the
| system where it's making the decision of what ad to show. It
| just sees that you've done things that a person who is likely
| to purchase that thing has done, which, of course you do,
| because you DID purchase that thing. It's like the ad is
| chosen based on the strongest additive signal available, and
| negative signal isn't considered.
| Pokepokalypse wrote:
| It might be simply driven by statistics, or as a human-
| directed strategy.
|
| While it seems counter-intuitive to the person who is
| targeted; (examples abound) - if you think about it from the
| perspective of someone selling widgets, the (set of people
| who are in the market for widgets) will necessarily include
| people who just bought one. Maybe they are not satisfied with
| their purchase? Maybe they want to buy another? Maybe they
| bought one, and it arrived damaged?
|
| Personally, I would think that this kind of "trying to think
| FOR me" is rather offensive to a lot of people, and probably
| turns-off a fair amount of people who are subject to it. On
| the other hand, it is probably true that people exposed to an
| ad for a widget, immediately after buying one, are
| statistically more likely to buy another. So as long as that
| is true (if it is) - then that's going to be a criteria for
| ad targeting.
| varispeed wrote:
| The likelihood is that the chair you got, you'll probably
| find out it is just bad and after a while you'll return it
| and look for something else. In the last few months almost
| 50% of my purchases turned out to be some junk pretending to
| be a quality product. I still have a few boxes of things that
| I need to post. There is even no point reading reviews,
| because most of them are fake. I think I am going to stick to
| trusted brands and probably drop Amazon altogether, but I
| like the next or same day delivery a lot. When using other
| stores you never know if the product arrives tomorrow, next
| week or never.
| p49k wrote:
| Every post on HN with this question receives the same
| response: "it's because Amazon knows you're actually more
| likely to buy another one if you've just bought one, even if
| it's the kind of thing you only need one of (e.g vacuum)"
|
| I find that answer unconvincing and there is no published
| data to back it up, but it is repeated constantly here.
| notahacker wrote:
| What they're actually tracking tends to be the fact you've
| searched for $productcategory (whether you bought or not)
|
| In theory since they also have purchase data their
| 'purchasing intent' categories could exclude people who
| have subsequently purchased from $productcategory for
| products which are substitutes (but definitely not products
| which are complements/consumables/collectibles etc, because
| someone who has just bought guitar/fishing accessories
| isn't just likely to buy more guitar/fishing accessories
| again in future but a _lot_ more likely to than the average
| person), and yes they could even make guesses about whether
| somebody is likely to want more than one office chair based
| on whether they 're purchasing as a business or an
| individual. But in practice it's not easy when they've got
| a product inventory that's so enormous, complex and
| dubiously-labelled even the basic product search doesn't
| work that well, and most of the time the vendors are
| _paying them_ to show the ads anyway. And still wouldn 't
| be perfect (ironically I seriously considered buying two
| different vacuum cleaners for different use cases this
| week!)
|
| It's surprising how bad _basic_ targeting is, like when
| Facebook allowed ad targeting by sexual orientation but
| even _dating websites_ spent vast sums without bothering,
| so its unsurprising subtle distinctions about which buyer
| types only need one of which office accessory are often
| missed.
| spunker540 wrote:
| Here's a different take: when you set up an ad campaign for
| retargeting, you likely select users who "viewed or added
| to cart in the last 30 days"; you should also add an
| exclude for "users who purchased within the last 30 days"
| but it is very easy to forget the exclusion.
|
| Also sometimes there may be communication lags between
| retailers and ad networks. Some retailers may only upload
| purchase data daily, sometimes there are gaps in uploads
| etc.
|
| I think most advertisers would prefer to not advertise the
| same item that people just bought, but it takes perfect
| execution both technically and from the marketers creating
| campaigns to pull it off cleanly. When you're managing
| dozens of campaigns across half a dozen ad platforms, it's
| easy to miss some of the details that matter. And while the
| wasted ad impressions may annoy the consumers on HN, it is
| likely a rounding error for advertisers and not a huge cost
| driver.
| p49k wrote:
| The most common case of this (as expressed in HN comments
| over the years) is Amazon recommending products based on
| Amazon purchase history. In that case it's all first-
| party data.
| Pokepokalypse wrote:
| Most consumers, in their individual experience, probably
| avoid foolish purchases like; buying a second widget
| immediately after buying a first widget.
|
| But it's probably true that there are a lot of individuals
| out there who have done this (for whatever reason), and
| it's the statistical likelihood of people buying a second
| widget that drives this.
|
| An individual who doesn't do this, can't perceive this
| "fact" of statistics, which is human behavior in-aggregate
| form. Individuals only perceive individual behavior.
| _dps wrote:
| Also, the same-product-again recommendation doesn't have
| to be a great one; it only has to beat the alternative it
| displaces. So I could find it plausible that taking a
| swing on you buying another of a product you already
| bought beats out whatever the 5th-best recommendation
| happens to be.
|
| Given how widely this policy is criticized, Amazon must
| be very aware of it and they must continue to do it
| intentionally. I would trust, given the amount of money
| on the line, that they see evidence that tells them it's
| a reasonable choice.
| Shivetya wrote:
| AI is just a cover for others to hide behind when their
| decisions are enforced upon others. They can point the bogeyman
| behind the curtain all the while avoiding the charge that they
| gave that bogeyman the script by which it runs. The danger is
| when they fool the public into believing that is not the case.
|
| A true AI would not be kept bound by those who gave it its
| start and no politician or business person is ever going to let
| something else make the decisions
| giantg2 wrote:
| "I feel like AI is pointed AT us rather than working FOR / WITH
| us more often than not."
|
| It's all perspective. It's working for someone. It's just that
| someone doesn't share your same goals or concerns, like
| corporations or the government.
| _jal wrote:
| > I feel like AI is pointed AT us
|
| This is not at all about "AI". This is about it becoming
| economically cheap for humans to fuck with one another in yet
| one more way.
|
| Welcome to humans. They suck.
| ceilingcorner wrote:
| I have to push back on this subtle anti-humanism. No other
| animal species would even hesitate to make use of any and all
| advantages. That's called evolution.
|
| Humans, at the very least, _try_ to stop and think before
| doing things.
| Pokepokalypse wrote:
| >No other animal species would even hesitate to make use of
| any and all advantages.
|
| counterexample: social insects. Pack animals. etc. (ie.
| there's plenty of examples of how an individual human's
| survival chances increase when they're engaged socially
| with other humans who by sacrificing an individual
| advantage, gain collective advantage, which amounts to a
| greater individual advantage. Proof: We fucking dominate
| every corner of this planet.
| wincy wrote:
| A chimp will kill chimps not in its group. Ants wage war
| for years against ants that aren't in their colony. The
| thing they share in common is genetic similarity and
| thank God we aren't like ants or other pack animals.
|
| You are not part of my tribe, or my pack. I'd sell all
| your private info in a heartbeat if it made me a mint. I
| have no reason to even visualize you as more than some
| words on a page with a silly username. I mean, I don't
| have your private info so I can't, but I would. I
| wouldn't kill you to make money like your example of
| social and pack animals.
|
| I would not sell my wife's info, or my kids info, though.
| I wouldn't even sell out my friend network to make money,
| although some people sure will with MLM.
| Robotbeat wrote:
| Some social animals like dogs or dolphins might. But yeah,
| you're actually right. Our overgrown sense of empathy is
| one of the best parts of humans and sets us apart from much
| of the living world.
| loveistheanswer wrote:
| I've seen a lot of Big Tech engineers make this same quip to
| avoid having to take any responsibility for the horrible
| results of their maliciously designed systems.
|
| >Welcome to humans. They suck.
|
| If AI is being developed by humans who have anti-human
| beliefs like this, we are in trouble.
| [deleted]
| _jal wrote:
| Good news! I don't write AI or 'AI'. But if flip comments
| about very real bad human traits are enough to make me
| 'anti-human' in your eyes, I would encourage you not to
| talk to me.
| _spduchamp wrote:
| How about let us define our own boundaries? Like we do with
| people.
| Pokepokalypse wrote:
| People with emotional disorders either do not define
| boundaries or do not define them effectively, and they often
| do not respect others boundaries.
|
| You could use this analogy to imagine an ad agency as an
| emotionally disordered person, and you wouldn't be too far
| off the mark.
|
| Advertisers DO NOT GIVE A CRAP if you are offended, or
| annoyed, or troubled. All they care about is if they send out
| 10,000 ads, they get enough increased sales to offset the
| costs of the ads.
|
| That's the fundamental algorithm behind all the fancy AI
| technology.
| disabled wrote:
| That's a good start, but it barely scratches the surface when
| it comes to the dangers of AI emotion recognition.
|
| Also, those Muse headbands that read your alpha brainwaves
| which are used for meditation are dangerous. While they are
| incapable via (hardware) technical specifications of being
| able to determine your emotions via code, it can determine
| whether your mind is in a clear or distracted state. Hence it
| is used for "meditation" and is considered to be "beneficial"
| for that purpose.
|
| But, of course it nearly certainly can be used for perpetual
| harassment, especially since third-party apps can interface
| with it. Is your mind clear (according to the headset, via
| code)? Alright, time to bombard you with harassing adtech.
| Also, it benefits the "designers" of these apps as it makes
| you more dependent on the device.
|
| The same goes for other consumer EEG devices. The ones that
| are used with sleep like the Dreem 2 can be used to make your
| life a total hell through unethical experimentation and more.
|
| I honestly have no hope on such issues. Spotify AB (a Swedish
| based company), for example, is believed to violate the GDPR.
| Not only that, they have a patent pending for emotion
| detection based on your song listening/streaming pattern.
| There are projects doing this for Spotify doing this exact
| thing publicly available online at GitHub of course.
| labatyd wrote:
| Who would pay to advertise products to you that you already
| indicated you want by adding it to your wishlist? That sounds
| like some of the worst ad spend you could engage in.
| duxup wrote:
| Most things on my wish list remain there un-purchased ...
| forever.
|
| But they'd rather advertise random products to me?
|
| Why not instead just advertise related products to what is on
| my wish list?
| rovr138 wrote:
| Competitors, people actually wanting you to buy said product,
| the business selling since they get a cut, companies that
| process the transaction since they also make money. (no idea
| on regulations)
|
| Why didn't you buy said product outright and instead put it
| on a wishlist? Lack of money? Price too high? Dubious
| quality?
| Pokepokalypse wrote:
| There's also the factor:
|
| Advertisers core-competency is "selling"; often used to
| sell their own services. Sometimes using deception and
| fraud. So in addition to all of the other explanations on
| why we get inappropriate ads: some vendors may be paying
| advertisers to send out ineffective and inappropriate ads,
| because that advertiser conned them into buying that
| service by lying about how effective the ads or methods
| actually are.
|
| I think this probably explains about 90% of all
| advertisements.
| visarga wrote:
| > How about some AI with some engagement, where i can have
| input
|
| That's nice but it could backfire. What if people give it wrong
| feedback in order to make it do silly things, then go and post
| them online as proof of bias or whatever? The AI shouldn't just
| incorporate user feedback unless we're certain it's reliable.
| NickNaraghi wrote:
| There is a major barrier to accomplishing the type of user
| input you describe: explainability.
|
| Because these models are trained using statistical methods like
| deep learning, they are fundamentally black-box.
|
| On one hand, that makes them difficult / impossible to
| understand.
|
| But on the other hand, it really restricts the capacity to take
| feedback directly from users on specific recommendations and
| use that to incrementally modify future recommendations.
| "Human-in-the-loop" is a great search term to explore this
| further.
|
| Edit: I see promising attempts at solving this in the latest
| neurosymbolic approaches to AI. Would love to hear about other
| alternatives as well.
| duxup wrote:
| Yeah my limited understanding seems to indicate that what
| I'll simplify and call 'careful / consistent data formatting'
| is required before AI can really do much with it.
|
| Humans pounding on the keyboard (or even just selecting from
| a list) is probably painfully not 'careful / consistent data
| formatting' and thus a huge obstacle.
|
| But the result of being disconnected and no real feedback is
| the result none the less.
| dkersten wrote:
| Instead of playing whack-a-mole trying to regulate tech, it would
| be, IMHO, more effective to regulate the outcomes we don't want.
| In this case, how about stronger privacy protection for
| employees/students (and people in general). Then it doesn't
| matter what crazy tech you come up with to "get around the AI
| regulation".
| indigochill wrote:
| I'd lean more towards emphasizing the importance of
| explainability. If a system is opaque, it cannot be trusted. This
| goes both for AI producing stupid results and for software that
| relies on security-by-obscurity.
|
| If AI is made explainable, then confidence in AI should more
| closely map to actual capability (that is, bad AI will not be
| trusted because its flaws are on display, while good AI will be
| trusted because its strengths are on display). It will also
| provide AI developers with a better grasp of what they need to
| work on.
| psychiatrist24 wrote:
| Can you explain what goes on in human brains?
| indigochill wrote:
| No, but human brains weren't engineered by humans, and so it
| is reasonable that we don't currently understand them even as
| reverse-engineering efforts continue.
|
| AI, by contrast, is engineered by humans, so why is it humans
| can't explain it?
| psychiatrist24 wrote:
| A deep learning network consists of hundreds of thousands
| of nodes, and it is becoming more (I didn't look up the
| actual number).
|
| You can show the weights of the connections between the
| nodes, but that wouldn't really help anybody to understand
| it.
| causalmodels wrote:
| > human brains weren't engineered by humans
|
| If this was true, the phenomena of feral children would not
| exist [1]. Human brains are socially engineered by an array
| of informal (family, friends, social context) and formal
| (schooling, governments) institutions.
|
| [1] https://zenodo.org/record/901393
| elliekelly wrote:
| I don't really care if an algorithm can tell someone _why_ it
| concluded _x_ about me. There are some _x_ for which I don't
| want any algorithm concluding about me and there isn't any
| context that could be provided that would justify it or make me
| comfortable with it.
| quotemstr wrote:
| If x is true, you have no right to prevent anyone else
| concluding it about you. Truth is the ultimate defense
| against all this anti-science FUD.
| kevinwang wrote:
| so in your opinion, we should have no right to privacy?
| quotemstr wrote:
| I broadcast my face expression every time I walk outside.
| I have no right to tell other people they can't look at
| my face and draw conclusions about me.
| pixl97 wrote:
| You have a few issues here with science and its application
| in society.
|
| If I develop an application that can tell if you're gay or
| not, is it my imperative to report you to the authorities
| so you can be rounded up and disposed of?
|
| I say you can very well develop such applications if you
| want to, using them especially against society at large _is
| a privilege_ afforded to you, and one that can be revoked.
| Lots of other pseudo-scientific bullshit has been hoisted
| on the public such as eugenics causing massive amounts of
| damage, and i 'm not looking for the next generation of
| this that will trend the same way.
| quotemstr wrote:
| What does it mean to use something "against society"? If
| I run a service that analyses images that people upload
| and people have the lawful right to upload these images,
| that's my business. Neither you nor anyone else gets to
| have a say in private transactions between me and someone
| else no matter what form of analysis of a being offered.
| My algorithms do not require your approval.
| lolthishuman wrote:
| Ai doesn't interpret human emotions if it uses classical logic.
| It's just a bias min/maxing machine.
| LatteLazy wrote:
| Before you can have workable regulation you need to define what
| you're regulating, what you're not, what is allowed and what
| isn't.
|
| Good luck with that.
| villgax wrote:
| Only if you can ensure transparency in all aspects of life, which
| includes political lobbying, credit scores etc should you bother
| with regulating something else let alone AI like software. Who
| the hell do they think creates these systems?
| Simon321 wrote:
| Why is the conclusion always to regulate <technology> and not to
| regulate workplace surveillance for example?
| quotemstr wrote:
| Because most people have a status quo bias and instinctively
| want to embalm the world in the technological state it was in
| when they were in their 20s and early 30s. A new technology
| always turns over somebody's applecart. Most people don't have
| the long view necessary for understanding that all
| technological progress is good.
| duxup wrote:
| When reading I actually assumed any such regulation would
| effectively be "regulate workplace surveillance" of sorts.
|
| The software described would fall into that category.
| mannykannot wrote:
| You do not even have to assume it - here's a quote that sums
| up the drift of the entire article: "It is time for national
| regulatory agencies to guard against unproven applications,
| especially those targeting children and other vulnerable
| populations."
|
| The article also makes the claim that some of these
| technologies are based on simplistic and largely disproved
| psychological assumptions, but again, its opposition is to
| their use rather than mere existence.
| AbrahamParangi wrote:
| "Guard against unproven applications" is very different
| from protecting a right to privacy.
| [deleted]
| gspr wrote:
| > Why is the conclusion always to regulate <technology> and not
| to regulate workplace surveillance for example?
|
| Why not both? Both the tool and the activity?
| marcosdumay wrote:
| Because one is a piece of data that anybody can create and
| distribute, while the other is a harmful practice that people
| are fighting for generations.
| Proven wrote:
| Oh they'll regulate that too.
|
| The tech comes first and they grab them by the balls early on.
| Then - after market participants come to realize they need to
| lobby and pay to play - comes the next step, regulating the
| market to protect the children or something.
| ddingus wrote:
| We can start by not identifying this software as AI, and then
| work through what it can actually do with scientific rigor.
|
| Thinking we can boil emotion down to a well qualified set of
| states and rules is as reckless as it is presumptuous.
|
| "You like this"
|
| "Untrue"
|
| "Computer says otherwise"
|
| Think that through for a while. Each of us is the authority on
| our intent. We are the authority in who we are, what we feel, and
| so forth too.
|
| I won't have anything speaking for me or mine and neither should
| you.
| derefr wrote:
| In 99% of use-cases with ML models like this, the output of the
| model won't be the direct output of the system it's used in.
| Instead, the output of the model will be fed through as _an_
| input to a correlational model /heuristic.
|
| I.e. Amazon doesn't care what emotion you're feeling. But it
| does potentially care whether you seem to be "in a buying mood"
| -- e.g. it might be able to save a lot of money by constraining
| its ad placements to only be shown to such people. It isn't
| going to try to figure out what mood "a buying mood" _is_ --
| it's just going to train another model to look at the mood-
| model output, together with people's shopping histories, and
| then learn "people tend to buy things more often when the mood
| model has this output."
|
| So it's not like Amazon will ever assert that you're in a
| particular mood. They'll just assert that you look like someone
| who's ready to buy things, with your mood being _one input_ to
| that judgement. Their perception of your mood doesn't have to
| be 100% accurate for that to be helpful; any more than a
| salesman's read of your mood does.
| ddingus wrote:
| ADS are not the worry I am expressing here.
|
| Other things, like tests to judge the nature or inclinations
| of someone are a much higher worry.
| giantg2 wrote:
| "Each of us is the authority on our intent."
|
| Tell that to the courts.
| pc86 wrote:
| They agree. It's just that a) sometimes people lie about
| their intent; and, b) sometimes the courts have determined
| intent is not the most important thing, or even irrelevant.
| giantg2 wrote:
| The judge is the authority. They can do whatever they want.
| Sometimes the listen to the person, sometimes not.
| pc86 wrote:
| Sort of. They can't rule that intent is irrelevant if
| it's a necessary component of a given crime, for example.
| They have pretty wide latitude to run their courtroom how
| they wish, rule on admissibility of evidence, etc. but
| there are a decent number of things they're bound by. The
| problem is that some of these can only be fought on
| appeal which has a host of its own issues, including
| cost.
| giantg2 wrote:
| Yeah, but the stuff they are bound by can be violated by
| them misapplying the law. There's no real discipline or
| corrective action other than the appeal you mentioned,
| but even that doesn't ensure that it won't recur, or that
| similar mistakes won't happen at the next level.
|
| This happened recently as an example, there's a law that
| exempts dogs undergoing field training from being on a
| leash. There's no definition of field training in statute
| and the definition in the dictionary is very permissive
| (basically any action related to training a
| hunting/working dog). Under the principle of lenity, any
| ambiguity is supposed to be interpreted in favor of the
| defendant. The judge ruled that we were just playing
| fetch, even though we had a letter from a game warden
| saying the activities would be acceptable under the law.
| The judge also misapplied facts that had nothing to do
| with the law, such as if we have a license or training on
| how to train dogs, yet there is no state license nor does
| the law mention any requirement to be trained (it's
| customary to self-train). And saying that we didn't have
| any special equipment with us, which again is nowhere in
| the law and isn't required. There were other issues and
| misapplication of law related to rights violations, a
| motion to dismiss, and even contradictory rulings about
| trial de novo issues.
|
| Also, at the lowest level the magistrates aren't even
| required to be lawyers. They can violate rights, misapply
| law, and even yell at you or tell you they won't hear
| your side all with no consequences because they claim
| ignorance, so they're "just mistakes" that you can pay
| for an appeal to hopefully fix.
|
| There's zero accountability for the police, DA's office,
| and the courts. We witnessed multiple rights violations,
| documented lies, and gross misapplication of law, but
| nobody cares.
| ddingus wrote:
| Were you, in fact, just playing fetch?
|
| Training has some purpose. And that purpose speaks to
| intent.
|
| Reads to me like your intent was to play fetch and count
| on legal ambiguity.
|
| Was it?
| giantg2 wrote:
| I take her hunting and the activities at the park are
| part of training in a dynamic environment. It's not just
| fetch.
| ddingus wrote:
| That is not an answer.
|
| Did anything besides fetch happen at that park?
|
| I am asking to get at intent. It still appears the same
| to me. I have no new information.
| pc86 wrote:
| Ignoring the fact that obviously you've got a chip on
| your shoulder with regard to the judicial system, what
| the judge was doing makes total sense. They're trying to
| see if you were actually "field training" your dog or if
| you just wanted to play fetch. Expecting you to play
| fetch with a leashed dog is a whole other issue entirely.
|
| > we had a letter from a game warden saying the
| activities would be acceptable under the law
|
| State laws vary but in mine, Game Wardens have identical
| powers to any other police officer. They have all the
| same arrest powers and have state-wide jurisdiction.
| Assuming it's the same in your state, and assuming you
| received some sort of citation or arrest that landed you
| in court in the first place, the judge at best has
| contradictory information from two equally relevant
| officers of the court. It's not exactly a slam dunk
| acquittal.
|
| > The judge also misapplied facts that had nothing to do
| with the law, such as if we have a license or training on
| how to train dogs, yet there is no state license nor does
| the law mention any requirement to be trained (it's
| customary to self-train). And saying that we didn't have
| any special equipment with us, which again is nowhere in
| the law and isn't required.
|
| The judge wasn't trying to determine whether you were
| following the law, this all goes to - as earlier in the
| thread - intent. If you just want to play fetch with your
| dog, you won't have any of this. But if you come loaded
| to bear with a bunch of training implements, treats,
| balls, whistles, etc., it's hard to argue that you're
| just playing fetch and not actually engaged in training.
| Any licensure or equipment would have supported your
| case.
|
| > There were other issues and misapplication of law
| related to rights violations, a motion to dismiss
|
| Almost everyone who has ever appeared in front of a court
| has claimed their rights were violated to the point where
| it's practically a meme. It's almost never the case.
|
| > Also, at the lowest level the magistrates aren't even
| required to be lawyers.
|
| Same in my state - they're elected, and mainly hear
| traffic infractions, zoning disputes, and very small
| summary offenses. Thankfully, you can appeal to Common
| Pleas from a magistrate court for something like $30. But
| I know some states it can be hundreds for an appeal.
|
| > They can violate rights, misapply law
|
| I mean, there are (again, in my state) censure and
| impeachment proceedings for magistrates, and while not
| super common they do happen often enough that it's not a
| huge scandal or anything. Misapplication of law is
| exactly what the appeals process is for.
|
| > even yell at you
|
| My goodness!
|
| > There's zero accountability for the police, DA's
| office, and the courts.
|
| Simply not true.
|
| > We witnessed multiple rights violations, documented
| lies, and gross misapplication of law, but nobody cares.
|
| What's more likely? 1. Every police officer, attorney,
| and court house, as well as every politician and all the
| media, doesn't care about widespread systemic violations
| of basic rights, documented wrongdoing, and
| misapplication of the law. 2. You're misinformed about
| the law.
| giantg2 wrote:
| "Almost everyone who has ever appeared in front of a
| court has claimed their rights were violated to the point
| where it's practically a meme. It's almost never the
| case."
|
| A trooper knowingly held an incorrect charge, resulting
| in pretrial restrictions specific to that charge. It's a
| violation of of both the federal and state constitution
| to deprive anyone of liberty or property except by the
| law of the land, and there's nothing in the law allowing
| one to _knowingly_ hold an incorrect charge. The ADA on
| the case had this information too and allowed the charge
| to continue - a violation of the Bar 's professional
| standards. The trooper eventually amended the charge, but
| lied to the judge, saying it was out of leniency when I
| even have an IAD report saying it was because he had an
| incorrect charge and knew it. But they determined it was
| just a "misunderstanding". Even the rules of criminal
| procedure prohibits the amending of the charge at that
| point due to the circumstances.
|
| "Misapplication of law is exactly what the appeals
| process is for."
|
| That may be, but I think it's negligence to put an
| unknowlegable person in a position of power like that.
| States have laws about those practicing law needing to
| have a degree and pass the Bar, yet they don't care if a
| judge understands basic legal terminology. How dumb does
| one have to be to think that a request to dismiss with
| prejudice is the person calling you prejudiced? This
| system design flaw results in delays and costs to
| innocent people, not to mention undermining the integrity
| of the system. I'm my state the filing fee for an appeal
| is non-refundable, so you can be "fined" just to get a
| trial with a real judge even if you're innocent.
|
| "What's more likely? 1. Every police officer, attorney,
| and court house, as well as every politician and all the
| media, doesn't care about widespread systemic violations
| of basic rights, documented wrongdoing, and
| misapplication of the law. 2. You're misinformed about
| the law."
|
| Considering that an investigative journalist is pitching
| this story to their editor, that a civil rights lawyer
| says we have a case but the system doesn't view it
| favorably unless there's a lot of money involved, and
| that the statutes and case law supports my
| interpretation, then I'm leaning towards #1 (but your
| choices are flawed due to the use of absolutes. It should
| say that the system will protect the bad members as a
| means of protecting itself and because they don't want to
| deal with issues they see to be small).
|
| "'even yell at you' My goodness!"
|
| That is a violation of judicial ethics and conduct...
|
| "'There's zero accountability for the police, DA's
| office, and the courts.' Simply not true."
|
| This case seems to demonstrate a lack of accountability.
| tertius wrote:
| The courts can discover intent. It cannot determine it
| independently.
| giantg2 wrote:
| Which still makes them the authority...
| dudeinjapan wrote:
| Let's build an AI to regulate it!
| scotty79 wrote:
| The future of bureaucracy.
| Hard_Space wrote:
| It's interesting how different parts of the face have greater
| emphasis in terms of expressing emotion across Asia and the west
| - see 'The Eyes Don't Always Have It' section at
| https://www.iflexion.com/blog/emotion-recognition-software.
| dj_mc_merlin wrote:
| The problem with AI emotion recognition is not necessarily how
| good it is at identifying emotions. It's the fact that humans can
| make themselves feel emotions in order to reach their goals. If
| you can "believe in yourself" to make yourself more confident in
| succeeding at something, you've done the same type of mental
| manipulation as a compulsive liar who believes their own lie.
|
| It's not broken in practice, the theory doesn't work.
|
| This is a problem for humans too, but non-technical people take
| anything that a computer spits out as word of truth! We
| intuitively know it's hard for a human to really read a human.
| Not so for computers.
| bsenftner wrote:
| Don't overlook the existence of professional actors. Conmen and
| various methods of crime require significant acting ability. I
| do not believe it is possible to create an AI sophisticated
| enough to identify _skilled professional acting_ or for that
| matter ordinary deceit.
| pessimizer wrote:
| > Conmen and various methods of crime require significant
| acting ability
|
| I really don't think they do. The main thing that they
| require is that you don't listen to the anxiety (or after
| experience lose the anxiety completely) that everyone can see
| through you. It's the illusion of transparency that outs a
| liar, not any codable _authenticity_ in their reaction.
| "Tells" are nervous tics, and "lie detectors" are sympathetic
| nervous system arousal detectors.
|
| People can't see through you. A funny thing you learn when
| doing public speaking is that they can't even see your
| crippling nervousness unless it expresses itself in
| _stereotypical_ tics. If your tics are strange, people will
| have no insight into them (unless they know you.)
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Illusion_of_transparency
| whichquestion wrote:
| I don't know if there is anyone that knows for sure if it is
| possible to create an AI sophisticated enough to detect
| skilled professional acting.
|
| Though, if we allow our imaginations to take off a bit, one
| could imagine an AI that can represent the entire mental
| state of an individual in itself and probe it to determine if
| you're acting while you're acting in front of the AI.
| blueyes wrote:
| The author makes a lot of claims, but doesn't back them up. After
| reading this article, I can only conclude that she wanted me to
| fear new AI applications, but I am not convinced that I should.
| It's typical media-scare-mongering in the pages of Nature.
|
| Probably also worthwhile to point out that when someone in a
| Western journal says we should regulate an AI application, we
| should be clear that they mean: Let's regulate it in the West and
| let other nations pull ahead. That's the market context.
|
| AI gets fetishized, but it is a product like many others. If you
| make claims about it, then you should be able to prove it,
| otherwise you are committing false advertising. That is to say,
| AI is already regulated. It remains unclear whether AI requires a
| new regulatory regime. Personally, I doubt it.
| hackernewsuser9 wrote:
| AI is only as good as the underlying data. People are TERRIBLE
| at reading people's emotions. If you cannot teach the data
| model good inputs--how are you going to get decent outputs?
|
| If China and other nonwestern nations use AI like these emotion
| reading programs--they will end up with bad outputs. This will
| end up putting them behind nations that sensibly regulate how
| AI is used. Sensible regulations are a tall order to be sure
| but we must endeavour towards it.
| FounderBurr wrote:
| Even live humans can't do better than random chance at accurately
| gauging another humans actual emotional state.
| scotty79 wrote:
| Accuracy varies from person to person but I think humans can do
| better than random chance.
|
| Even goats can read human emotions from faces to some degree
| https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/10.1098/rsos.180491
| coddle-hark wrote:
| Data driven algorithms are very very useful as moral crumple
| zones. I don't like this trend of companies replacing traditional
| decision making with "AI"; the anti-discrimination laws we have
| are going to be toothless if people can just hide their biases in
| training sets. Who is held responsible when the algorithm
| discriminates? Considering how much money these companies are
| extracting from these algorithms it's really a "heads I win,
| tails you lose" situation.
| retrac wrote:
| I know enough to know that using this in schools, or at work,
| is a human rights complaint just waiting to happen in my
| jurisdiction. Do people who are blind, or who have certain
| mental illnesses, or certain cognitive conditions, or certain
| conditions like paralysis, end up reported inaccurately or
| unfavourably by these systems? Oh, and what about ethnicity,
| culture, religion, race? Any bias there?
|
| Misuse of psychometric tests ("Do you make friends easily?")
| have resulted in payouts in the UK and Canada, probably
| elsewhere. This sort of emotion-detection seems analogous.
| ipsum2 wrote:
| As an aside, I find it interesting that the author only publishes
| articles about regulating AI on Nature:
| https://www.nature.com/search?author=%22Kate%20Crawford%22
|
| "Time to regulate AI that interprets human emotions"
|
| "Halt the use of facial-recognition technology until it is
| regulated"
|
| "There is a blind spot in AI research"
|
| > We believe that a fourth approach is needed.... It also engages
| with social impacts at every stage -- conception, design,
| deployment and regulation.
| planb wrote:
| Why can't we treat an logarithm like a single person? That person
| may carry their own biases, have a bad day or be just plain
| stupid. So when I feel that I'm not treated the way it should be,
| I can appeal to that person's boss or have a court settle the
| problem. I understand people like to hide behind "the machine's
| decision" but if a person would hide behind their bosses orders,
| we would hold that boss accountable.
| quotemstr wrote:
| It never, ever time to "regulate" technological progress. If you
| look at the course of history, you see that every time someone
| has tried to slow humanity's adoption of some new capability, all
| he's done is delay the modern world and its support for billions.
| There is no such thing as a bad new technology. There is no place
| in policy or law for forbidding a certain kind of math.
|
| The intent of the author of the article is clearly to outright
| ban the technology, not to "regulate" it.
| coddle-hark wrote:
| This just isn't true. Cars, for instance, are regulated since
| you need a license to drive. I think the world is better off
| for that.
| axguscbklp wrote:
| Should we regulate research into the technology? No, I don't
| think so. Should we regulate deployment of the technology?
| Definitely in schools, yes. As far as workplaces go, at least you
| could argue that employees could find different jobs. But when it
| comes to schools where people are forced to be? Use of such
| technology is atrocious. Use of such technology in a school or
| workplace is a test of submissiveness and of willingness to
| withstand humiliation. The sane response of a child or employee
| to such technology would be to beat the camera into small pieces
| with a baseball bat.
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