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How to identify your gender, ethnicity and sexual identity by watching Love Death + Robots

Sogeti Labs
August 05, 2019

A few days ago, I attended a webinar on AI. The speaker Jose Luis Calvo (@joselcs) was talking about the current status of Artificial Intelligence. He started talking about the differences between specific and generic AI, and how far apart they are from each other. During his speech, he said something that unsettled me: “Google´s new AI is better at creating AI than the company´s engineers”. Awesome, in the future, AI will grow by itself.

But the point that really hit me was the controversy about the episodes’ order of Netflix’s new series, called Love Death + Robots. Some people received the chapters of the series in a different order than others. I have to say that I have never seen such interference before. Someone commented that the recommended path was different regarding your preferences. Also, some people commented that the order was more in line with your sexual identity and this was the beginning of the boom!

Image source: Netflix

During the following days, many people started writing tweets regarding this! Even Netflix had to send an advisory explaining that there is nothing behind and that they didn’t use AI to recommend the order of the episodes to the viewers. But I think, it was not enough! There are a lot of people unconfident about AI.`

Image source: Twitter

Sometimes AI provides biassed output due to datasets, and I think that in this case, it could be an error because I think that Netflix never wanted to use recommendations in this way. And I trust the company´s explanation!

Still, to present the main AI risks:

  1. AI Bias
  2. Privacy
  3. Fake or real
  4. Jobs

Nevertheless the point is that we have to go ahead and start working on AI´s ethics, otherwise newer bad uses will increase and the confidence of the people will disappear with time.

Finally, I want to say that, I trust in AI benefits. There are a lot of use cases that provide incredible improvements regarding; healthcare, security, manufacture, industry and so on. That is why we should never break confidence.

About the author

SogetiLabs gathers distinguished technology leaders from around the Sogeti world. It is an initiative explaining not how IT works, but what IT means for business.

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