One thing to be said for granting personhood to intelligent machines is that we could then blame them for things that go wrong.
From Sarah Jeong at The Verge:
Over the course of an accumulated 10 hours spread out over two days of hearings, Mark Zuckerberg dodged question after question by citing the power of artificial intelligence.
Moderating hate speech? AI will fix it. Terrorist content and recruitment? AI again. Fake accounts? AI. Russian misinformation? AI. Racially discriminatory ads? AI. Security? AI.
It’s not even entirely clear what Zuckerberg means by “AI” here. He repeatedly brought up how Facebook’s detection systems automatically take down 99 percent of “terrorist content” before any kind of flagging. In 2017, Facebook announced that it was “experimenting” with AI to detect language that “might be advocating for terrorism” — presumably a deep learning technique. It’s not clear that deep learning is actually part of Facebook’s automated system. (We emailed Facebook for clarification and have not yet heard back.) But we do know AI is still in its infancy when it comes to understanding language. As The Verge’s James Vincent concludes from his reporting, AI is not up to snuff when it comes to the nuances of human language, and that’s not even taking into consideration the edge cases where even humans disagree. In fact, AI might never be capable of dealing with certain categories of content, like fake news.More.
Of course Facebook would not be able to deal with “fake news.” For one thing, much of the normal news stream is fake news. But the only possible remedy is the cultivation of good judgement. In any event, the term has become a catch-all for things someone with a position somewhere finds it inconvenient or distasteful that others should hear.
Highlights from Mark Zuckerberg’s testimony
See also: Experts slam EU proposal to grant personhood to intelligent machines
Part I: What is fake news? Do we believe it?
Part II: Does fake news make a difference in politics?
Part III: What can we do about fake news that would not diminish real news? Critics of ‘fake news’ should go to China — only the government has the right to post fake news.
And
Extra! Extra! A handy guide to the normal fake news: Surviving information overload