For many of you this may not be alarming news, but for others, it will come as an absolute shock, and you may feel slightly cheated or even outraged. How dare these bots take advantage of people’s good natures and stir trouble just when it’s most unwelcome. But, that’s exactly what happens and statistics show that around 20% of all political tweets made in the upcoming weeks to the election were not even made by humans.
These Twitter bots are designed to keep conversations and tweets going and are to coexist with humans in our lives in Twitter has its own way. Using robots to answer simple questions or carry out easy transactions is great, but, to start playing with democracy is another ball game. Facebook too was a party to the political bot frenzy as AI is integrated as a major component of the social media site and is a subject of much controversy at the moment. However, when probed about the issues, Zuckerberg simply replied, “there is more we can do” (to prevent false stories from escalating), but, he continued “I believe we must be extremely cautious about becoming arbitrators of the truth ourselves.”
There are other forms of AI bots that work directly with the government, police, and courts, and just this summer a Pro Publica investigation showed just how algorithm dependent the criminal justice system is upon predicting if a criminal is likely to re-offend. Other algorithms looking to be used include those which use predictive tools to decide things like what type of prison to send a criminal to and what rights they should get. But, where will it end?
In an effort to try and regulate AI, many companies have established best practices and codes of ethics to follow in this diverse area. And, to keep us all in the loop, a project called the One Hundred Year Study on Artificial Intelligence will publish an update on AI right up until 2116. So, there isn’t much we can do to keep bots away. The best we can hope for is that we are prepared and can only hope that the safety measures put in place to protect us from any wrongdoings bots may be capable of, do just that.
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