zifnab25 [he/him, any]

  • 0 Posts
  • 7 Comments
Joined 4 years ago
cake
Cake day: July 27th, 2020

help-circle


  • Europeans: “Those perfidious Russians and the nefarious Chinese are the two single biggest threats to our domestic security. Why… they’ll just hack into any old thing and fill it full of evil communist propaganda. They’ll shut down our critical infrastructure, hijack our data services, and spam us so full of phishing attempts that you won’t know what’s safe to click on! And all just to watch us fail, then laugh at us. The fiends!!!”

    Also Europeans: “Google’s CEO said we need to dismantle the last ten years of digital safety standards so we can undermine the YouTube adblocker. Make this our top priority.”



  • yeah, the comic describes it as “the virtually impossible”

    We are a lot better at it now than we were, say, ten years ago. But it is nearly trivial to outwit a “bird detecting algorithm” by holding up a vague facsimile of a bird. That gets us back to the old TrashFuture line about AI just being “some dude at a computer filling out captchas”.

    I’m not saying we aren’t building on centuries of work, i’m saying the rate of recent progress is remarkable.

    The recent progress is heavily overstated. More often than not, what a computer does today to recognize a bird is to pull on a large library of data labeled “birds” and ask if there’s a close-enough match. But that large library is not AI driven. Its the consequence of a bunch of manual labeling done by humans with eyes and brains. A novel or rare species of bird, or a bird that’s camouflaged, or even just a bird that’s out-of-focus or badly rendered, will still consistently fail the “Is this a bird?” test.