August 2020 – AI in Media and Society

How weird is AI?

August 28, 2020September 18, 2020 Mindy McAdams

For Friday AI Fun, I’m sharing one of the first videos I ever watched about artificial intelligence. It’s a 10-minute TED Talk by Janelle Shane, and it’s actually pretty funny. I do mean “funny ha-ha.”

I’m not wild about the ice-cream-flavors example she starts out with, because what does an AI know about ice cream, anyway? It’s got no tongue. It’s got no taste buds.

But starting at 2:07, she shows illustrations and animations of what an AI does in a simulation when it is instructed to go from point A to point B. For a robot with legs, you can imagine it walking, yes? Well, watch the video to see what really happens.

This brings up something I’ve only recently begun to appreciate: The results of an AI doing something may be entirely satisfactory — but the manner in which it produces those results is very unlike the way a human would do it. With both machine vision and game playing, I’ve seen how utterly un-human the hidden processes are. This doesn’t scare me, but it does make me wonder about how our human future will change as we rely more on these un-human ways of solving problems.

“When you’re working with AI, it’s less like working with another human and a lot more like working with some kind of weird force of nature.”
—Janelle Shane

At 6:23 in the video, Shane shows another example that I really love. It shows the attributes (in a photo) that an image recognition system decided to use when identifying a particular species of fish. You or I would look at the tail, the fins, the head — yes? Check out what the AI looks for.

Shane has a new book, You Look Like a Thing and I Love You: How Artificial Intelligence Works and Why It’s Making the World a Weirder Place. I haven’t read it yet. Have you?

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Uses of AI in journalism

August 27, 2020 Mindy McAdams

Part of my interest in AI centers on the way it is presented in online, print and broadcast media. Another focal point for me is how journalism organizations are using AI to do journalism work.

At the London School of Economics, a project named JournalismAI mirrors my interests. In November 2019 they published a report on a survey of 71 news organizations in 32 countries. They describe the report as “an introduction to and discussion of journalism and AI.”

Many people in journalism are aware of the use of automation in producing stories on financial reports, sports, and real estate. Other applications of AI (mostly machine learning) are less well known — and they are numerous.

*Above: From page 32 in JournalismAI report*

Another resource available from JournalismAI is a collection of case studies — in the form of a Google sheet with links to write-ups about specific projects at news organizations. This list is being updated as new cases arise.

*Above: From the JournalismAI case studies*

It’s fascinating to open the links in the case studies and discover the innovative projects under way at so many news organizations. Journalism educators (like me) need to keep an eye on these developments to help us prepare journalism students for the future of our field.

Interrogating the size of AI algorithms

August 26, 2020August 26, 2020 Mindy McAdams

I have watched so many videos in my journey to understand how artificial intelligence and machine learning work, and one of my favorite YouTube channels belongs to Jordan Harrod. She’s a Ph.D. student working on neuroengineering, brain-machine interfaces, and machine learning.

I began learning about convolutional neural networks in my reading about AI. Like most people (?), I had a vague idea of a neural network being modeled after a human brain, with parallel processors wired together like human synapses. When you read about neural nets in AI, though, you are not reading about processors, computer chips, or hardware. Instead, you read about layers and weights. (Among other things.)

A deep neural network has multiple layers. That’s what makes it “deep.” You’ll see these layers in a simple diagram in the 4-minute video below. A convolutional neural network has hidden layers. These are not hidden as in “secret”; they are called hidden because they are sandwiched in between the input layer and and output layer.

The weights are — as with all computer data — numeric. What happens in machine learning is that the weights associated with each node in a layer are adjusted, again and again, during the process of training the AI — with an end result that the neural network’s output is more accurate, or even highly accurate.

As Harrod points out, not all AI systems include a neural network. She says that “training a model will almost always produce a set of values that correspond or are analogous to weights in a neural network.” I need to think more about that.

Now, does Harrod definitively answer the question “How big is an AI algorithm?” Not really. But she provides a nice set of concepts to help us understand why there isn’t just one simple answer to this question. She offers a glimpse at the way AI works under the hood that might make you hungry to learn more.

Face detection without a deep neural network

August 25, 2020August 28, 2020 Mindy McAdams

I was surprised when I watched this video about how most face detection works. Granted, this is not face recognition (identifying the specific person). Face detection looks at an image or video and can almost instantly point out all the human faces. In a consumer camera, this is part of the code that puts a rectangle around each person’s face while you’re framing your shot.

What’s wonderful in the video is how the Viola–Jones object detection framework is illustrated and explained so that even we non-math types can understand it.

Like the game cases I wrote about yesterday, this is a case where tried-and-true algorithms are used, but deep neural networks are not.

As is typical with AI, there is a model. How does the code identify a human face? It “knows” some things about the shape and proportions of human faces. But it knows these attributes (features) not as noses and eyes and mouths — as we humans do. Instead, it knows them as rectangular shapes that map very well to the pixels in a digital image.

*Above: Graphic from Viola and Jones (2001) — PDF*

Make sure you stay with the video until 3:30, when Mike Pound begins to draw on paper. (This drawing-by-hand is a large part of why I love the videos from Computerphile!) At 8:30 he begins drawing a face to show how the algorithm analyzes that segment of an image.

The one part that might not be clear (depending on how much time you spend thinking about pixels in images) is that the numbers in the grid he draws represent values of lightness or darkness in the image. In all cases, computers require knowledge to be represented as numbers. When dealing with images, numbers represent differences. To compare sections of an image with other sections, the numeric values for one section are added up and compared with the sum of numeric values from another section.

The animations in the final three minutes of the video provide an awesomely clear explanation of how the regions of the image are assessed and quickly discarded as “not a face” or retained for further examination.

Computers are lightning-fast at these kinds of calculations. This method is so efficient, it runs rapidly even on simple hardware — which is why this method of face detection has been in use since 2002.

What is called ‘AI’ but really isn’t

August 24, 2020August 24, 2020 Mindy McAdams

Because “artificial intelligence” and “AI” have become such potent buzzwords in business — and so many firms are trying to sell some kind of “AI” system or software or strategy to every business possible — we should all take a step back and evaluate whether there is actual AI operating in some of these systems.

That won’t always be easy to discern. If a company claims there is “AI” in its product, they are not going to divulge exactly how it works. If they want to convince you, their literature or their engineers will likely throw out a tangled net of terms that, while accurate, might not help anyone but another engineer understand what’s inside the black box.

I was thinking about this recently as I worked on assignments for an online computer science course in AI. One of the early projects was to program a tic-tac-toe game in which a human can play against “an AI.” Just like most humans, the AI can force a tie in every tic-tac-toe game unless the human makes a mistake, and then the human will lose. I wrote the code that enables the AI to play — that was the assignment. But I didn’t invent the code from nothing. I was taught in the course to use an algorithm called minimax. Further, I was encouraged to make my program faster by using another algorithm called alpha-beta pruning.

*Illustration of alpha-beta pruning (Wikipedia, by Jez9999, GNU license)*

There is no machine learning involved in those two algorithms. They are simply a time-tested way for a computer language to direct a certain kind of look-ahead in a two-player game (not only tic-tac-toe).

Don’t despair or tune out — look at the diagram and understand that the computer, through instructions in my code, is able to rapidly advance through every possible outcome in tic-tac-toe and see how to: (a) prevent a win for the opponent, and (b) win if a win is possible.

There is no magic here.

*Tic-tac-toe with “AI” playing X, human playing O.*

Another assignment in the same course has the students programming “an AI” that plays Minesweeper. This game is quite different from tic-tac-toe in that there is only one player, and there is hidden knowledge: The player doesn’t know where the mines are. One move at a time, the player builds knowledge about the game board.

*Completed Minesweeper game, with AI playing all moves.*

A human player doesn’t click on a mine, because she chooses squares that are next to a 0 (indicating no mines touch that square) and marks a mine square when it becomes obvious that a mine is hidden there.

The “AI” builds knowledge in a way that it is programmed to do (that is the assignment). In this case, there is no pre-existing algorithm, but there are principles of logic. I programmed “knowledge” that was stored in the program each time the AI clicked a square and a number was revealed. The knowledge is: (a) that number, and (b) the coordinates of all the surrounding squares. Thus the AI “knows” that, for example, among eight specified squares there are two mines.

If among eight specified squares there are zero mines, my code tells the AI to mark all eight of those squares as safe. My code also tells the AI that if there are any safe moves left to be made, then make a safe move. If not, make a random move. That is the only time when the AI can possibly set off a mine.

Once again, there is no magic here.

In contrast to these two simple examples of a computer successfully playing a game, AlphaGo (which I wrote about previously) uses real AI and could not have beaten a human Go master otherwise. Some games can’t be programmed with only simple algorithms or logic — if they are to win, they need something akin to intuition.

Programming a computer to develop and use an approximation of human intuition is what we have in today’s machine learning with deep neural networks. It’s still not magic, but it’s a lot more complicated than the kind of strictly mapped-out processes I wrote for playing tic-tac-toe or Minesweeper.

Visual Chatbot: What can AI tell you?

August 21, 2020September 18, 2020 Mindy McAdams

To see for yourself the product, or end results, of an AI system, check out the Visual Chatbot online. It’s free. It’s fun.

Screenshot of dialog with Visual Chatbot

This app invites you to upload any image of your choice. It then generates a caption for that image. As you see above, the caption is not always 100 percent accurate. Yes, there is a dog in the photo, but there is no statue. There is a live person, who happens to be a soldier and a woman.

You can then have a conversation about the photo with the chatbot. The chatbot’s answer to my first question, “What color is the dog?”, was spot-on. Further questions, however, reveal limits that persist in most of today’s image-recognition systems.

The chat is still pretty awesome, though.

Public domain photo of a soldier and a dog indoors, probably in an airport, with a "Welcome Home" balloon. U.S. Department of Defense photo. — *U.S. Department of Defense photo, 2015 (public domain)*

The image appears in chapter 4 of in Artificial Intelligence: A Guide for Thinking Humans, where author Melanie Mitchell uses it to discuss the complexity that we humans can perceive instantly in an image, but which machines are still incapable of “seeing.”

In spite of the mistakes the chatbot makes in its answers to questions about this image, it serves as a nice demonstration of how today’s chatbots do not need to follow a set script. Earlier chatbots were programmed with rules that stepped through a tree or flowchart of choices — if the human’s question contains x, then reply with y.

You can see more info about Visual Dialog if you’re curious about what the Visual Chatbot entails in terms of data, model, and/or code.

Below you can see some more questions I asked, with the answers from Visual Chatbot.

Some of my favorite wrong answers are on the last two screens. Note, you can ask questions that are not answered with only yes or no.

Who labels the data for AI?

August 20, 2020August 24, 2020 Mindy McAdams

In yesterday’s post, I referred to the labels that are required for supervised machine learning. To train a model — which enables an AI system to correctly identify or sort images or documents or iris flowers (and so much more) — each data record must include one or more labels. For an image of a dog, for example, the labels might be dog and Great Dane. For an iris flower, the label is the name of the exact species of that individual flower.

Nowadays there are people all around the world sitting at computers and labeling data.

In the 6-minute video above, BBC journalist Dave Lee travels to Kenya, where about 2,000 people work in a Nairobi office for Samasource, which produces training data for use in machine learning.

You’ll see exactly how every single item in one video frame is marked and tagged — this is what a vision system for a self-driving car needs if it is to avoid crashing into mailboxes or people.

In the Nairobi office, 52 percent of the workers are women. The pay is terribly low by Silicon Valley standards, but high for Kenya. Lee doesn’t gloss over this aspect of the story — in fact, it’s central to the telling.

Financial Times journalist Madhumita Murgia wrote about Samasource in July 2019. Her story also covers iMerit, a similar company with offices in Kolkata, India, as well as California and Louisiana.

“An hour of video takes eight hours to annotate. In fact, a McKinsey report from 2018 listed data labeling as the biggest obstacle to AI adoption in industry.”
—Financial Times

Some very large and widely used datasets such as ImageNet were labeled by self-employed workers for extremely low rates of pay — often through the Amazon-owned Mechanical Turk crowdsourcing website (which also offers up far worse tasks for similarly low compensation). In contrast, Samasource’s CEO Leila Janah told Murgia that the company’s pay rate is “almost quadruple” the previous income of their workers in developing countries.

Janah also pointed out that these workers are not just labeling cats and dogs. They have been trained, for example, to label diseased cells in photos of cross-sections of plants for one particular project. They are providing real human intelligence that is specialized to very particular problem sets.

Fortune journalist Jeremy Kahn wrote about other companies that also provide data-labeling services for top multinational firms. Labelbox and Scale AI have received heaps of funding from venture capitalists, but I couldn’t find any information about their workers who label the data. Is this something we should be concerned about? Probably so.

Both Samasource and iMerit are upfront about who their workers are and where they do the work (this might have changed since the spread of COVID-19 in early 2020). Are the dozens of other companies supplying labeled data to corporations and universities in the wealthy countries paying their workers a living wage?

“Often companies have a need for both general and more expert labeling and employ a combination of outsourcing firms, freelancers, and in-house experts to affix these annotations.”
—Fortune

Labelbox, in fact, doesn’t employ people who do the labeling work, according to Fortune. It provides “a tool for managing labeling projects and data across different contract labelers, who often work for large outsourcing firms.”

ImageNet and labels for data

August 19, 2020September 3, 2020 Mindy McAdams

Supervised learning is a type of machine learning in which a model is trained using labeled data. You begin with a very large collection of labeled data. (In the case of ImageNet, the data were all digital images. For the Iris Data Set, the data all refer to individual iris flowers, which can be divided into three related species. For the MNIST dataset, the data are images of about 70,000 handwritten numbers, 0 through 9.)

You divide the dataset into two parts, the training data and the test data. The split might be 70/30, or 80/20. You don’t choose which data goes into which group. Then you run the training data many, many, many times, adjusting certain parameters in the code along the way, until the code consistently returns good results — that is, the thing the code identifies (an object in an image, an iris species, a number) matches the label (which is hidden from the code).

At that point, you have a trained model. You feed the test data set to it and see whether the accuracy rate is also high. (It’s important that none of the test data were used to train the model.) Again, the proof is in the labels.

In a later post I will discuss how data come to be labeled. (Hint: It’s not elves.) In this post, I will discuss bad labels. Specifically, I want to highlight the work that AI researcher Kate Crawford and artist-researcher Trevor Paglen did around the famous ImageNet dataset.

In the video above, Crawford and Paglen present this work and show a lot of great examples. They also published a long article about the work, if you’d rather read than watch.

ImageNet is a huge collection of labeled images. More than 14 million images. They were labeled according to a set of categories and synonym groupings from WordNet, an English-language lexical database. The images were labeled by humans.

And that, it seems, is at the root of the problem.

Crawford and Paglen were interested in the ImageNet photos of people. Person is a category in WordNet. Within the category, there are many descriptive terms for people, such as “cheerleaders, scuba divers, welders, Boy Scouts, fire walkers, and flower girls.” So the photos of people in ImageNet are labeled with these terms. However, not all terms are neutral.

“A young man drinking beer is categorized as an ‘alcoholic, alky, dipsomaniac, boozer, lush, soaker, souse.’ A child wearing sunglasses is classified as a ‘failure, loser, non-starter, unsuccessful person.’”
—Crawford and Paglen

You might say, well, where’s the harm? They are only labels in a database, after all.

The ImageNet database has been used to train many convolutional neural networks used in image-recognition software.

When you feed a photo of yourself into an image-recognition application, you might be surprised at the labels that are applied to you. For example, an image of Paglen (a white man with a shaved head) was labeled as “Klansman, Ku Kluxer.”

Paglen built a web app called ImageNet Roulette so that anyone could upload a photo of themselves or a friend and see what labels were applied. (The app is no longer online.) It became clear that perfectly innocuous people in photos were being labeled as criminals or dangerous, or with racist or sexist terms.

About 952,000 of ImageNet’s 14 million images were in the person category as of 2010 (source). Many of those images — with their labels — were removed after the opening of Crawford and Paglen’s art exhibition, Training Humans, in Milan in September 2019.

ImageNet has been used to train countless image-recognition systems since 2010.

Additional information:

Leading online database to remove 600,000 images after art project reveals its racist bias (September 2019), The Art Newspaper.

GPT-3 and automated text generation

August 18, 2020August 24, 2020 Mindy McAdams

GPT-3 has to be the most-hyped AI technology of the past year. Headlines said its predecessor, GPT-2, was “too dangerous” to be released publicly. Then it was released. The world did not end.

Less than a year later, the more advanced (next generation) GPT-3 was released by OpenAI. Why are people so excited about GPT-3? See for yourself in the video below.

GPT-3 is a natural language generation (NLG) system. Given instructions about what you want, it writes original text that — in most (but not all) cases — sounds like a human wrote it. The technology could be used to rapidly write 10,000 fake user comments into a discussion forum, for example. Or 10,000 fake restaurant reviews.

Don’t worry about the first examples in the video showing GPT-3 writing computer code, if that’s not something you’re well acquainted with — it quickly moves on to show the system extracting text from long documents and writing summaries on the fly. The presenter does a good job of demonstrating the breadth and variety of tasks GPT-3 can be used for. You might be flat-out amazed.

Bear in mind that the examples shown in the video are different, separate applications of GPT-3. You don’t just install GPT-3 and it does all of those things.

Developers can apply to gain access to the GPT-3 API. This enables them to create applications that use GPT-3 but not to see or modify the actual code that makes GPT-3 work. You can view more examples of GPT-3 applications at that same link.

Another nice thing about the video above is the explanation of generative pre-training. Instead of training the GPT-3 model (or models) only with labeled data (supervised learning), the OpenAI researchers used “a semi-supervised approach for language understanding tasks using a combination of unsupervised pre-training and supervised fine-tuning.” The pre-training for GPT-2 included a dataset of more than 7,000 unpublished books “from a variety of genres including Adventure, Fantasy, and Romance.” Because entire books were used — instead of sentences separated from their context — the model was able to learn long-range structure.

GPT-3 used even more long-form texts for pre-training (described in a technical paper):

*Above: Screenshot from “Language Models Are Few-Shot Learners,” Brown et al., July 2020*

Once again we can see that tremendous advances in AI capability are made possible precisely because today’s computer hardware has the ability to run through enormous quantities of data very quickly. It’s not only that we now have billions of pages of text in digital form. It’s not just that we can store that Himalayan mountain range of data. It’s very much because processors are able to run multiple calculations simultaneously at lightning speed.

An important point about GPT-3 that’s not covered in the video: None of these applications, or GPT-3 itself, understands the meaning of the text that is being generated.

It’s going to be very easy for people to jump to conclusions about the “intelligence” of a computer system when it’s able to generate responses and explanations that are so human-like. There is no comprehension here. There is no knowledge of the world — there is only knowledge about language itself.

To learn more about how GPT-3 does what it does: GPT-3 Explained in Under 3 Minutes.

Untangling speech recognition

August 17, 2020October 14, 2020 Mindy McAdams

Dealing with language is so complicated! In this post I want to focus on speech, voice, audio — but bear in mind that text is also language, and unlike humans, a machine must be able to process text if it’s going to do anything at all with language.

The speech part of machine learning goes two ways: The machine can “hear” speech as audio (it receives audio and simultaneously creates a digital representation of it) — but to make sense of it, to use it (to find the answer to your question, for example), the machine must convert the audio into text. On the other hand, before the machine can “speak,” it needs text — and that text must be converted into digital audio. For the machine, these are not just one thing and its reverse.

Until I began researching this, I hadn’t given any thought to accents. I had thought about the differences among languages (and I still don’t know whether it’s harder, easier or the same to train a speech-recognition system in tonal languages such as the Chinese languages, or Vietnamese, as compared with a non-tonal language such as English), but I’d never considered that a person speaking English with an accent might not be “understood” by a speech-recognition system.

Behind the Mic: The Science of Talking with Computers (2014)

This breezy video from Google (7 minutes) does a good job of conveying a bit of the actual science behind how Siri, Alexa or Google Assistant “know” what we are saying when we speak to them. Even though it’s from 2014, there’s nothing outdated (as far as I know). You can see how the machine represents the speech it takes in. Like many explanations I found, however, it kind of mushes the text part and the sound part altogether, leaving the viewer with a general sense of how it all works but still in the dark as to how the parts work, separately. (I don’t like how they show a human brain when they talk about neural networks. That’s very misleading.)

The video provides a quick background on the development of speech recognition, which was pretty awful until just a few years ago when researchers started applying deep neural networks to the acoustics part. Just like image recognition, speech recognition got a tremendous boost from the advances in computer processing hardware that now allow immense quantities of data to be analyzed at super speed.

To get a handle on how the separate parts of a speech-recognition system work, I needed to listen to this podcast from March 2020. It’s a 50-minute interview with Catherine Breslin, a U.K. machine learning scientist who specializes in speech recognition. She worked at Amazon Alexa for four and a half years. There’s a full transcript at the same URL if you’d rather read than listen.

For speech recognition, machine learning is used to train separate models — one for acoustics, and one for language. There’s also a third piece, the lexicon, which indicates the sequence of phones (the tiniest sound segments) that make up a single word. I don’t yet understand how that part is made. (Any program that reads text aloud would need to have a lexicon.)

“So if we put these together, we have an acoustic model, which tells you from some audio which sounds are likely to be spoken at that time; the lexicon tells you how those sounds combine into words, and then the language model tells you how those words combine into sequences of words.”
—Catherine Breslin

The three pieces, Breslin explains, work together in a decoding process that produces text from speech — the most likely representation of what was said. I looked at some further technical explanations of how the decoding is done, and it resembles a system for AI analysis of game moves — giant trees, many layers, lots of nodes. What the system needs to learn is the probabilities for sounds forming words forming sentences.

Note, all this is just to get to where the machine has the text of what was said. It hasn’t yet done any analysis of what was meant. Whew.

However, apart from voice assistants like Siri and Alexa, this process by itself has tremendous value for transcription. It is used to produce transcripts of radio programs, interviews and meetings, as well as to generate subtitles for movies and videos.