AI’s outputs are high yield when we own the responsibility of being stewards of that data, like a conductor who holds herself responsible for interpreting any musical work. In research we know that correlation is not causation. This truth must be repeatedly pounded into the minds of data interpreters because human nature causes us to continually fall prey to an appetite for shortcuts and oversimplification. Our minds too easily glom onto two factors that reside within in the same set and assign a causative relationship.
Humans will seek sugar as a solution for hunger though it provides no nutrients and rather causes the body to deploy hazardous and injurious clean-up chemicals to deal with those inputs. Dieters continually leap at this poor solution for their hunger and never reach their goals. Mankind will forever uphold a misguided confusion of our relationships with all the things around us. We feel better with a response, even if it is wrong. We must embrace this truth as we build our relationship with AI.
In Google Photos if you rely on the automated search feature, the term “dandelion” will return all your photos of coffee cups. A non-English speaker would then conclude that a shallow white mug filled with dark brown liquid is a dandelion and would carry that assumption forward as truth. I would assume that somewhere there is a coffee shop called, perhaps, The Dandelion Café, and so the correlative crutch of Google Photos’ wee brain saw the many coffee cups pictured in connection with this thing labeled “Dandelion” … and would thusly have you sipping a flowery weed with breakfast if you let automation drive the bus.
A learning machine can be led absolutely anywhere. Even with added filters for more humanesque judgment of right and wrong, good or bad, probable or unlikely, any automated machine will leap all too quickly to conclude rather than question. That is its job.
It is, however, your job to be the conductor who reads the music sheets and asks many questions about how that should be played. It is your job to impose a bias for curiosity and skepticism, filtering for the outcomes you expect and then digging for missing pieces, the whitespace, the outlines of black holes…
It is also your job to play with automation to your heart’s content to force the novelty to wear off. Let the excitement of rapidly generating factual and rhyming poems wane. Consider that true poetry conveys an insight and attitude that breathed air for only a moment and is special because it was captured in writing just before that moment of evaporated. I’d rather read a poem that reads only “The.” if it is a window into the spirit of one soul, at one poignant moment, wherein he was feeling deeply and utterly “The.”
