Fear the algorithm

A new twist on cyberfear might be surfacing this season, as people blame algorithms for embarrassments.

For example, a Solid Gold Bomb t-shirt advised us to

What a terrible product!

But wait, there's more.  As one critic notes, this might be "Algorithms as excuse. Algorithms as plausible deniability for your poor taste."  Listen to the apology text:

[W]e did not in any way deliberately create the offensive t-shirts in question and it was the result of a scripted programming process that was compiled by only one member of our staff...

So they blame the machine, while admitting some human involvement.  It's akin to blaming computer games for mass killings.

Not convinced?  Read on:

Solid Gold Bomb founder Michael Fowler decided to create a flood of parodies. He gathered up a list of words, threw them into a script and pressed ‘go’.

Fowler describes culling a list of ‘millions’ of generated phrases down to 700, and checking the phrases for graphical approximation to the original, apparently without noting the contents.

"without noting the contents".  This isn't machine error, but a human mistake.  And:

He claims to be as surprised as the rest of us that an offensive combination ended up in the database. (In fact, several offensive combinations showed up, which is to be expected if you put words like ‘rape’ or ‘choke’ or ‘hit’ in your list of verbs.)

Indeed.

It's important to keep our critical gaze turned on cyberculture and its emerging aspects.  But we also need to bear in mind our (American, at least) tendency to shift blame onto the machines.

(thanks to Jesse Walker; image via BoingBoing)

Comments

[Joe Murphy]

They taught me about "garbage in, garbage out" in grade school (and specifically in the context of computers, although I never had meaningful programming instruction). Has that principle been lost in the drive to "teach kids to code"? (Or, more likely, in the drive to sit down, shut up, and memorize what is on the state assessment exams...)

[Lesliemb]

Seems to me this is the "long tail" in action--marketers and vendors trying to cover all market niches, and the automation goes awry. But hey--this development may create a new job niche for humanities grads: long tail filter specialists, folks who have sufficient critical thinking skills and cultural literacy to prevent these kinds of blunders.

[Bryan Alexander]

Good point, Joe. Or the rush to profit.

I think you just glimpsed the future, Leslie. Humanists as.... readers.