Google AI propaganda comics
Remember those old US Christian propaganda comics? Google AI did the same, but for machine learning. Admittedly, this is a useful artifact if you want to summarize the rudiments of it. Plus, it is impeccably crafted, because Google money bought "Bite Me" artist Dylan Meconis and... OMG, Scott McCloud himself. But the amount of ideological BS is unbearable. Especially in light of how they went the extra mile to conceal the #digitallabor that is necessary to generate and annotate data. I mean, for pete's sake, in this story labeled data literally fall from the frigging sky (see case n. 28). And, yes, it is mentioned in passing that when you practice machine learning "you will need humans to sort data by hand". But those humans are not considered essential to and never depicted within the narrative. The story takes place in a STEM world: a white limbo whose only characters are an engineer, a mascot-like computer, and a cat. Here be coders, coders' machines and coders' pets! In this worldwiew, even a feline is more important than a micro-worker to explain how ML comes to be. But enough with me ranting. Here's the story: https://cloud.google.com/products/ai/ml-comic-1/ You can read it, discuss it with friends, use it to teach your "AI & society 101" class. But always remember that, in the immortal words of Shakespeare, "this is a tale told by a software engineer, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing (but their own viewpoint)". -- Antonio A. Casilli Associate Professor (HDR), Telecom Paris (Paris School of Telecommunications) Member, Interdisciplinary Institute for Innovation (i3 UMR 9217 CNRS) Associate Member, LACI-IIAC (EHESS) Faculty Fellow, Nexa Center for Internet & Society
participants (1)
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Antonio Casilli