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How can we tell good AI from bad?
More lessons from the jagged frontiers of new technology
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All technologies are good at some things – like mimicking human expressions (above) – and bad at others. The difficulty with AI is it can be hard to tell when it is doing a good job, says the writer.
PHOTO: AFP
Tim Harford
Among the many steps along the road to high-performance artificial intelligence (AI), one of the most important was taken in 2007 by Professor Fei-Fei Li, then an assistant professor in Princeton’s computer science department. Using Amazon’s Mechanical Turk service to amass many millions of small acts of human judgment, Prof Li built a vast database of hand-labelled images.
“We settled on a goal of 1,000 different photographs of every single object category,” she writes in her autobiography The Worlds I See. “One thousand different photographs of violins. One thousand different photographs of German shepherds.”
