Breaking the Black Box: Episode 4: Artificial Intelligence

Siri, are you artificial intelligence?

SIRI: Close enough, I'd say.

Artificial intelligence is
when humans train computers

to recreate the workings
of the human brain.

AI occurs when machines

have learned to recognize enough patterns

to be able to make decisions on their own.

Episode 4, Artificial Intelligence.

So what does that actually look like?

Here's how Google uses
artificial intelligence

to write email replies for you.

An email comes in. It says,
are you free tomorrow?

It moves through the thought
vector, which is a black box.

And what comes out the other
end is the AI response.

Yes, what's up?

But AI can go horribly wrong.

Google was using AI

to tag images that were
uploaded to the web.

Google's AI engine started to tag images

of black people as gorillas.

The company apologized and
said they would fix it.

AI is only as good as
the patterns we teach it.

So if we give it biased, stereotyped,

or even racist information, what then?

In one study, researchers
trained an AI program

with 3 million words from
Google news articles.

This is what they found.

The closest word to the query
black male, returns assaulted.

While the response to
white male, is entitled to.

If we're not intelligent
about how we train our robots,

they will perpetuate the
worst of human behavior.