A very noticeable manifestation of the rise of so-called Artificial Intelligence has been the use of AI bots in censoring posts. The most recent example of this I’ve seen was on Saturday when I wrote a post about the general election candidates for my constituency, Kildare North. As usual when I write an article here it gets posted automatically on a variety of other platforms, including LinkedIn. However, Saturday’s post was blocked:
The powers that be did not tell me which of the “Professional Community Policies” that post might have violated so I looked through them all and couldn’t find any plausible reason for blocking that post. I can only assume some defect in the algorithm deployed by LinkedIn had been triggered wrongly. Unfortunately, all this is run by machine so there is no possibility of appeal.
I’ve noticed quite a few bizarre things like this over the past few weeks. The worst offender when it comes to random censorship is Meta (which runs Facebook, Instagram and Threads). I have been posting content automatically on Meta platforms, Facebook and Threads. Recently, however, Meta’s AI algorithm has gone berserk. A couple of weeks ago it blocked this post (about the Edgeworth family) on the grounds that it violated rules concerning “nudity or sexual activity”. Heaven knows how it decided that; you can read the post yourself. I defy you to find any nudity or sexual activity, or reference thereto, or link to any post that mentions such things, anywhere in it!
When I appealed the decision I got this.
Truly bizarre.
More recently, it blocked this post (one of my regular weekly updates for OJAp) on the grounds that it was identified as spam. I can see the need for an automatic screening given the huge volume of posts, but the problem is that my facebook feed is full of actual spam that gets through these filters while innocent posts get blocked. In other words the algorithm is crap. If you ask for a review of the decision, all Meta does is run the algorithm again – with the same results, which is a waste of time.
The algorithm that screens comments on this blog for spam has also been playing up, with some comments from regular contributors being tagged as spam.
None of these is in itself of any consequence to me personally, not least because I’m not trying to run a business using these platforms. However, such AI engines are being deployed nowadays in a huge range of contexts primarily in order to save money. No doubt such processes do save money, but if they are based on poorly constructed algorithms – which they seem to be – the consequences could be dire. Imagine the horror of a health service based on poorly trained AI…
In the Dark 