Data-Driven Leadership and Careers

Bonus: A demo that shows why you shouldn’t treat AI like a magical box of magic

Cassie Kozyrkov

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Feb 28, 2020

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With all the gratuitous anthropomorphization infecting the machine learning (ML) and artificial intelligence (AI) space, many businessfolk are tricked into thinking of AI as an objective, impartial colleague that knows all the right answers. Here’s a quick demo that shows you why that’s a terrible misconception.

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A task that practically every AI student has to suffer through is building a system that classifies images as “cat” (photo contains a cat) or “not-cat” (no cat to be seen). The reason this is a classic AI task is that recognizing objects is a task that’s relatively easy for humans to perform, but it’s really hard for us to say how we do it (so it’s difficult to code explicit rules that describe “catness”). These kinds of tasks are perfect for AI.

The demo

I hear groans from those of you who have been around AI for a while — you are so sick of the cat/not-cat task. Fair enough, but humor me just this once. For this exercise, you will be my AI system…