You probably don’t expect this statement. It may surprise you to hear this statement from a technology professional, but I believe the artificial intelligence (AI) systems are dumb. Yes, they are stupid because they are still at the nascent stage of development and very immature.
I earn my living by architecting and designing AI systems but ironically, in my personal life, I became a victim of AI especially in social platforms.
Social media and artificial intelligence do not mix well. I wouldn’t dare to say artificial intelligence is antisocial but instead would say that it does not understand what social means yet.
Let me give you a few examples so that you can understand my point.
I accumulated around 9,000 followers in Twitter over ten years. One day an alarm on my Twitter account caused my account to be suspended. The account and my list of followers couldn’t be recovered despite my best efforts. It created a terrible disappointment and shattered my trust in Twitter.
Considering the benefits of Twitter for writers, I created another account in February 2020. The account’s purpose is solely to generate visibility for Medium articles that I read. I also tweet stories published in my publications.
A few weeks ago, Twitter suspended my account again for no reason. I was warned via an email my account was had violated Twitter rules, and was thus flagged as non-compliant.
I provided Twitter with more-than-enough evidence. 99% of my content is about Medium, and I rarely share personal thoughts, for example, beautiful quotes. I love beautiful quotes. I just don’t tweet them. I only tweet Medium stories. I thought Medium and Twitter have good relationships.
Twitter admitted it was a mistake and recovered my account. But I lost hundreds of Medium members I collected in a Twitter List. After several requests, Twitter did not fix my issue, which was caused by the suspension process. This is what a supposedly intelligent system did! And Twitter support did not even acknowledge my emails.
Let’s take Facebook as another example. A few months ago, one of Medium’s writers created an insightful and engaging humour piece. The story was shared on ILLUMINATION’s Facebook page. Facebook reduced the privileges of our website because the AI system rated it as “hate speech, racist and against values of Facebook communities”.
The AI system is still so dumb they have no sense of humour yet. They never will because as that requires emotional intelligence!
And now to Quora! Well, this is an interesting one.
Quora suspended my account because their AI system did not recognize Dr. as a title and thought it was my first name. The AI couldn’t verify my name with my Google account, which has no title. When people click my account, they received a message the account violated Quora’s rules!
It took me 48 hours to fix the issues after removing the Dr. before my name. But my followers in Quora thought that I made a severe mistake when they saw violation. I felt victimized by an AI system once more from one of my favourite social platforms.
I mention my affinity on LinkedIn, but I was victimized by LinkedIn’s AI system too!
Several years ago, after a keynote speech in an international symposium, a few thousand people followed my LinkedIn account. I collected hundreds of business cards from attendees of the conference.
As a courtesy to my followers, I attempted to connect with them using the business cards. I validated I had actually met them, and I know them. But the LinkedIn AI system blocked my account with the excuse of not meeting their policy because the number of connection requests exceeded their arbitrary limit.
This one is a bit unusual. Reddit is known as a community-oriented platform. A few weeks ago, I posted a story to a Fitness group sharing my personal experiences. I linked to one of my popular articles because it was related to the post.
Within a few hours, Reddit sent me a notification saying something like “You are banned from this community for a lifetime. This decision was made to protect the community”.
I still cannot stomach this message from Reddit. It’s AI system treated me like a criminal.
There are many more examples. I gave these only a few examples.
If I am affected this much, as an AI professional, probably everyone is affected and victimized. One of my goals is to reduce the pain and suffering of people from this senseless AI!
The last two days, I feel the AI system on Medium is hunting me. Yesterday, I was blamed as a spammer. Today, I was accused of having duplicate content. What next!
I shared my feelings about this in the attached story.
Thank you for reading my perspective on these insults offered by Artificial Intelligence.