Digital Discourse Database

Number of Posts: 8
Posts 1 - 8

I can't be trusted with Google's texting app

Hyperlink

Newspaper | Telegraph
Date | 19.5.2016
Language | English
Country | UK
Topic Tags | Google, language threat, texting, word/writing, youth
Summary | Google's new Allo app is supposed to make you save time while you're texing, but it can sometimes lead to misunderstandings. The author of the article doesn't really like emojis and doesn't know how to use them well. She doesn't follow young people's digital habits. Their generation favors brevity, which can have a negative impact on language.
Image Description | Photograph of two young girls on their smartphones, two smartphones displaying chat conversations, and a man standing in front of a screen displaying "Allo" and "Duo".
Image Tags | female(s), male(s), smartphone, text

Teaching A.I. Systems to Behave Themselves

Hyperlink

Newspaper | The New York Times
Date | 13.8.2017
Language | English
Country | U.S.
Topic Tags | artificial intelligence, Facebook, Google, threat
Summary | Artificial intelligence systems have made huge development leaps in recent times but there is still a lot of learning to do. The image recognition AI assistants of Facebook and Google demonstrate how, on the one hand, they can recognize a lot of images correctly if they have had enough data to learn from and, on the other hand, how it still makes bold mistakes. It suffices to manipulate a few pixels and the AI system gets confused. Developing AI systems not only takes a lot of data but also trial and error phases which are monitored and taught by human teachers.
Image Description | Programmers working on computers.
Image Tags | computer/laptop, female(s), male(s)

Google is training a 'bonkbuster bot' to write raunchy fiction by pumping it full of SOFT PORN

Hyperlink

Newspaper | Mirror
Date | 6.5.2016
Language | English
Country | UK
Topic Tags | artificial intelligence, Google
Summary | Google is training a machine to write soft porn novels in order to make the machine more conversational. Google's love machine will be able to see how words are combined and how they are used in order to better understand language.
Image Description | Two photographs of half naked women, and photograph of a man and a woman in bed
Image Tags | female(s), male(s)

YouTube Sets Policies To Restrict Extremism

Hyperlink

Newspaper | The New York Times
Date | 18.6.2017
Language | English
Country | U.S.
Topic Tags | artificial intelligence, Google, marketing, threat, YouTube
Summary | Google has been using artificial intelligence to weed out offensive videos from YouTube and take them down. It is quite good at detecting nudity, graphic violence, and copyright violations. However, other less straightforward offensive material remains on the platform such as cultish sermons by extremist muslims. These are however not being monetized by displaying advertising next to them.
Image Description | An image of the London Tower and a portrait of a man.
Image Tags | female(s), male(s)

In Europe’s Election Season, Tech Vies to Fight Fake News

Hyperlink

Newspaper | The New York Times
Date | 1.5.2017
Language | English
Country | U.S.
Topic Tags | computer programming, Facebook, fake news, Google, law, politics
Summary | In light of recent elections, many people are eager to combat misinformation online. Major tech companies like Facebook and Google are being pressured to purdue solutions to stop the spread of fake news on their platforms. Germany even demands fines from Facebook for not complying with federal laws targeted at keeping hate speech and fake news controled. Competitions with rewards of several thousand dollars are asking for programmers to come up with fact-checking software which can weed out false news.
Image Description | Image of a computer programmer working on solutions to flag fake news and a Reuters image of election posters from France.
Image Tags | female(s), male(s)

Uncle Sam Wants Your Deep Neural Networks

Hyperlink

Newspaper | The New York Times
Date | 22.6.2017
Language | English
Country | U.S.
Topic Tags | (mental) health, artificial intelligence, brain, Facebook, Google
Summary | Image recognition softwares are being developed with artificial intelligence technologies. Programs are fed information that they are supposed to learn from much like a human brain. Google and Facebook have been using such an approach for a while to enable the recognition of faces in images. The field of medicine is also using artificial intelligence softwares to augment doctors' analytic abilities in detecting lung cancer for instance and airport security is using such technology for their body scanners.
Image Description | A woman standing in an airport body scanner with a male officer in the background.
Image Tags | female(s), male(s)

Wenn das Handy antwortet: So zahlen wir in Zukunft

(When the phone responds: this is how we will pay in the future)

Hyperlink

Newspaper | Handelszeitung
Date | 2.3.2017
Language | German
Country | Switzerland
Topic Tags | artificial intelligence, Google, marketing, smartphone
Summary | Various companies like Google and Amazon are coming up with new conversational commerce solutions, i.e. (voice command) chatbots with which one can conversationally make purchases online. Making payments via smartphone apps is very common in China while Switzerland is lagging behind. Some companies like Mastercard are already working on further ways to pay, namely by verbal cues. This means that people will only have to say it to secure the payment.
Image Description | Two informational videos and a series of photos from a technology convention.
Image Tags | female(s), hand(s), male(s), smartphone, tablet

Google's future is useful, creepy and everywhere: nine things learned at I/O

Hyperlink

Newspaper | The Guardian
Date | 18.5.2017
Language | English
Country | UK
Topic Tags | artificial intelligence, Google, privacy, threat
Summary | Google presented their new technology and their main focus is artificial intelligence. Google's Assistant is now proactively listening and making suggestion (for instance to leave the house early because of traffic) without users having to activate it by saying "OK Google". It will also be available accross devices. Google are attempting to replace Siri on Apple devices. Google's Assistant is much better developed in being able to understand colloquial commands. They are also working on connecting their Assistant with the camera, so that one could hold up the phone to a restaurant and get reviews about that restaurant pulled up. This has huge potential for making the lives of visually impaired people easier.
Image Description | Reuters and Getty images of Google CEO Sundar Pichai, YouTube CEO Susan Wojcicki, and the Google Assistant home speaker.
Image Tags | female(s), Google, male(s), YouTube

Page 1 of 1