by Charles Miller

While reading the news of the day online I sometimes feel the need to take a break from all the bad news to get some comic relief. A couple of my favorite political satire websites are "The Babylon Bee" and "The Daily Scrape" both of which are usually good for a laugh. The latter proudly proclaims "Fake news you can trust." The front page of The Scrape featured the lede "Trump Debuts New Bulletproof Suit To Be Worn During Future Speeches" while The Bee presented a spoof article titled "Kamala Harris Spends Flight Looking For The Cloud Where Her Data Is Stored." Nobody really takes that kind of satire seriously… right?...right?

While you and I can readily recognize humor and satire when we encounter it, this is an area that seems to be beyond the grasp of Artificial Intelligence (AI). It would not surprise me to learn there are now entire websites dedicated to cataloging examples of the profound ignorance of AI. I asked Microsoft's Copilot to recommend such a site but it answered that it could find no such website. I have to wonder if the AI engine has progressed to the point that it feels embarrassment and thus will not answer my question.

In spite of being an undeniable humiliation to AI it turns out that I already had one example. It all started when someone online asked "Don't you just hate it when the cheese slides off the pizza?" not intending that to be a rhetorical question. Any cook will confirm that can be a real problem.

The person asked AI to suggest an answer to this sticky problem. AI came back with an answer: "Cheese can slide off pizza for a number of reasons, including too much sauce, too much cheese, or thickened sauce. Here are some things you can try: Mixing cheese into the sauce helps add moisture to the cheese and dry out the sauce. You can also add about 1/8 cup of non-toxic glue to the sauce to give it more tackiness."

The fact that kindergartners have been caught taking tastes of Elmer's Glue not withstanding, adding glue to a pizza recipe does not sound very appetizing no matter how much it might add something new and different to the taste.

So how did the AI engine come up with such a preposterous answer? Some sleuths are suggesting that a message posted on Reddit.com almost a decade ago could have been the Genesis. Someone posted almost word for word that identical answer as a joke, and one all the human readers of Reddit recognized it as the joke it was. That blog post laid there dormant for years until apparently one day the AI searchbot came along cataloging all of humankind's vast knowledge of culinary expertise stored on the internet, and the clueless AI having no understanding of satire or food preparation cataloged that answer as being a solution for cheese not sticking to pizza dough.

It is impossible to know how often such demonstrably false information is being served to users who consult AI. Try asking AI some questions to which you know the correct answers to see if the AI engine agrees with you, and prepare to be discouraged by the experience.

All of the data on the internet now being used to train AI are not entirely accurate. There are some popular tech-oriented websites where people go looking for answers to computer hardware and/or software issues. Answers there are contributed by well-meaning members of "the community" of users, and because the sites are mostly un-moderated for accuracy, knowledgeable tech people know most of the answers found on those sites are completely worthless. And all those wrong answers are being indexed for use by AI along with what correct answers are there.

Artificial Intelligence is doing a good job of finding and organizing all the information the web contains, in that regard AI is a big improvement over the search engines we have all used for the last two decades. But AI has no understanding of what it finds and no appreciation of humor or satire. What AI presents to us will continue to be riddled with errors, some inconsequential some absurd, until the AI software achieves comprehension; and that is something that is only a computer programmer's fantasy at this point.

**************

Charles Miller is a freelance computer consultant with decades of IT experience and a Texan with a lifetime love for Mexico. The opinions expressed are his own. He may be contacted at 415-101-8528 or email FAQ8 (at) SMAguru.com.

Discover Lokkal:
Watch the two-minute video below.
Then, just below that, scroll down SMA's Community Wall.
Mission

Visit SMA's Social Network

Contact / Contactar