Editor’s note: Alexander Ferguson, CEO of YourLocalStudio.com, continues his Uptech series about Artificial Intelligence, in an interview with echnologist and digital marketing thought leader William Ammerman, author of the recently published “The Invisible Brand: Marketing in the Age of Automation, Big Data, and Machine Learning.”

In our third and final video, technologist and author William Ammerman walks us through some of the terms we’ve heard at many times in the media but might not totally understand. He then gives us a hopeful story of how these technologies can be used for the public good.

  • The interview:

An algorithm is a set of instructions; let’s be very super clear about that. It’s a set of computer instructions. You might follow an algorithm in your morning ritual of turning the alarm off and getting up out of bed. Now that is an algorithm of sorts. You reach over, the alarm goes off, you reach over, you turn off the alarm, you lay there for a few seconds, you swing your feet out of bed, you sit on the edge of your bed for a second, you stand up. Every step in that process could be recorded as a step-by-step procedure.

Another way to think about algorithms is that they work together; they work reciprocally. They interact with one another.

Great example: There was an auction at Christie’s where they auctioned off this piece of artwork, and I think it sold for something like $40,000. And it was a painting, painted by a GAN algorithm, and this algorithm really took the combination of two algorithms working in concert—actually kind of competitively.

One algorithm was designed to create works of art, billions of combinations that it thought were human-like. The other algorithm judged the output of the first algorithm. So, the first algorithm is just designed to make pretty pictures. The second algorithm is designed to judge which ones humans will like, based on machine learning.

So, now you’ve got two algorithms working hand in hand to produce a piece of artwork that actually sold for $40,000 at Christie’s auction house.

  • But how can these algorithms be used to better serve the public good? Ammerman offers a hopeful story.

Something very interesting happened when Wikipedia was created. Wikipedia was created largely by human contributors who were contributing information into Wikipedia. And, over time, Wikipedia got populated, and somebody looked at it and said, “You know, it’s a very strange thing, “but Wikipedia seems to be biased in favor of male scientists.”

They did a study on this, and they realized that, yeah, women, female scientists are vastly underrepresented in Wikipedia. And they started to go backwards and try to deconstruct that, and they figured out that the majority of Wikipedia contributors were men. And I don’t know exactly what the percentages were, but more men were contributing to Wikipedia than women.

Worried about manipulation by Artificial Intelligence? You should be, author warns

And so, they actually wrote an algorithm to go in and identify this bias and start to correct for it. So, they started to try to intentionally balance the scales and try to say, “okay there’s lots of brilliant female scientists. They just happen to be underrepresented by a bias in the system. We’re going to actually use an algorithm to go back and try to correct that bias.”

So, not only can algorithms produce biases unintentionally, but the good news is, if we identify those algorithms, we can actually use algorithms to correct biases and identify them.

Thanks for watching this installment of our deep dive into the world of artificial intelligence. To hear more from William Ammerman on the modern age of digital marketing, be sure to check out his book, The Invisible Brand. If the AI system on your smartphone can’t help you locate a copy, then check out Amazon, Barnes & Noble, or anywhere books are sold. This is Alexander with UpTech Reports.

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