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Comment by pilif | Hacker News Reader

>We are working to fix the issue that allowed this to happen

This is not some issue that you can fix. This is not some color being off, or some chat message appearing out of order. This is about AI in its continued infancy that’s now being actively and maliciously targeted.

It’s also about a huge responsibility of the worlds two greatest media outlets that both think they can have machines do a humans job and miserably failing at it.

Some users unable to log in? That’s an “issue” you “fix”.

Bringing the world closest it has been to the brink of a world war in the last 30 years, that’s the point where you step back and f'ing take responsibility for your actions and start rethinking your approach.

Sorry for the harsh words. I’m probably overreacting.

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You are understating and giving a pass for the real issue at hand - a lack of ability to think critically by a large portion of our population. Let's assume for argument's sake that Google News and Facebook shut down their feeds tomorrow - can you tell me with confidence that another one won't mushroom up and take its place or that people won't switch to "dark" networks - Whatsapp, Messenger, Email and what not?

I'm not absolving Google and Facebook. There are more trustworthy places to get your news and information. Why do you think people flock to less reliable sources? Unless that's solved, democracy and with it culture and progress as we know it is destined to be doomed.

Lesson to be learned:

Wisdom and knowledge do not come from technology. They come from wise and experienced educators working one-on-one with their students, not to tell them the truth, but to help them experience the truth. Nullius in verba!

Ed-tech is confidence game.

What technology offers is the productive capacity to support a world filled with actual human educators and actual human intelligence.

Neither of them would be considered "Media Outlets" since they don't employ reporters or an editorial board. You are overreacting because it's not Google or Facebook pushing bad content on you - it's you choosing to believe it at face value. And by "you" I mean "the collective you" - everyone has a responsibility to determine if the information they've received is correct or not. If you cannot verify it - don't believe it. If there aren't multiple sources claiming the same thing, it's probably an opinion.

To "fix" this, we either need to reduce the allowed error rate, or enforce a disclaimer which states something like "This information is collected automatically by a program. No human reviews this, so please do your own research."

It's a multi-faceted problem to be sure, people need to take responsibility for themselves, and I think the trend over time is for people to become more sophisticated about truthiness. The problem is that we are right in the thick of a publishing revolution where the traditional signals about the quality of information are out the window, and the flow of information is so much broader and more diversified, leading to an explosion of confirmation bias and worldview silos. Google and Facebook are right at the center of this, and making the problem worse with AMP and video-jacking, and personalizing feeds to optimize purely for engagement.

Using old terminology like "media outlet" does nothing to address the problem, all it does is frame the issue in a way that supports the narrative that these companies are mere aggregators that can bear no responsibility for the information they are disseminating.

Well, frankly, that's bullshit. You have to look at the actual effects in order to make any kind of reasonable judgement on the situation. Google and Facebook are a huge contributor to the fake news problem, and despite how difficult and maybe intractable the problem is, they are also uniquely positioned to be able to make a difference. They deserve to be held to a higher standard, and regardless of their protests, they at least have the resources to try harder.

The kinds of systems picking up these stories isn't "AI". PageRank I wouldn't classify as AI.

The real issue is that any system which attempts to organize or curate untrusted information is subject to adversarial attacks.

AI up until this point, has been mostly trained on labeled, human curated data sets. But as it starts to get trained on real user input, it'll be subject to attacks by people trying to game it. AI needs to address this robustly, but it's in it's infancy as you say.

I mean, we're still working on bias issues like machines learning that "doctor" is "male" because you trained on a corpus of English text, and therefore, most of the input text referenced a doctor as male, and that's the AI getting poisoned by cultural biases, which wasn't even an organized attack.

This is advertising platforms being given a free pass on liability for the content they get paid to distribute, nothing less and nothing more.

I have little problem with the reality that automation is taking away jobs machines are better at. We know machines build cars on an assembly line better than humans.

But generally, old jobs going away make room for new jobs coming in. And it seems to me like we have a whole mountain of new potential jobs in the content curation and moderation area. We see time and time again that this is something machines are not better at, but unfortunately, companies are very resistant to realizing their approach is inadequate.

I feel this is largely because they have no reason to. Due to a couple of laws, Internet platforms are largely not liable for these sorts of things, so they have no incentive to hire people and/or do a better job.

I think you're way off base here.

Based on the story linked, this event was the result of a situation occurring that google engineers did not anticipate. It's just an edge case that was not handled properly.

There's nothing "AI specific" about that. Clearly google is going to continue using algorithms to rank pages, and clearly this will sometimes return bad results.

The people who expect the top stories on the internet returned by Google to be unfailingly factual and true are the ones ceding a human’s job to a machine.

> This is about AI in its continued infancy that’s now being actively and maliciously targeted.

Indeed. If we do end up with some sort of "malicious AI apocalypse", then it will be because some humans wanted it to happen.

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