Also, dieses Maschinelle Lernen ist ja überall. Aber ist es auch überall notwendig? Oder sind die Ergebnisse oftmals, nun ja, erwartbar. Und mit ein bisschen nachdenken und präzisen Algorithmen nicht mindestens genauso zu erreichen?
This is, by the way, the dirty secret of the machine learning movement: almost everything produced by ML could have been produced, more cheaply, using a very dumb heuristic you coded up by hand, because mostly the ML is trained by feeding it examples of what humans did while following a very dumb heuristic. There’s no magic here. If you use ML to teach a computer how to sort through resumes, it will recommend you interview people with male, white-sounding names, because it turns out that’s what your HR department already does. If you ask it what video a person like you wants to see next, it will recommend some political propaganda crap, because 50% of the time 90% of the people do watch that next, because they can’t help themselves, and that’s a pretty good success rate.
Das Zitat stammt aus einem Blogpost der Gattung „schöne Mischung aus Rant und Analyse“ und hat die These: Für Empfehlungsalgorithmen braucht’s jetzt dieses viele Daten sammeln eigentlich wirklich nicht.
Mehr aus Forget privacy: you’re terrible at targeting anyway:
Probably what it does is infer my gender, age, income level, and marital status. After that, it sells me cars and gadgets if I’m a guy, and fashion if I’m a woman. Not because all guys like cars and gadgets, but because some very uncreative human got into the loop and said „please sell my car mostly to men“ and „please sell my fashion items mostly to women.“ Maybe the AI infers the wrong demographic information (I know Google has mine wrong) but it doesn’t really matter, because it’s usually mostly right, which is better than 0% right, and advertisers get some mostly demographically targeted ads, which is better than 0% targeted ads.
You know this is how it works, right? It has to be. You can infer it from how bad the ads are. Anyone can, in a few seconds, think of some stuff they really want to buy which The Algorithm has failed to offer them, all while Outbrain makes zillions of dollars sending links about car insurance to non-car-owning Manhattanites. It might as well be a 1990s late-night TV infomercial, where all they knew for sure about my demographic profile is that I was still awake.