The AI Conversation Has Exploded This Decade With Big Advances

Discussion of artificial intelligence has skyrocketed since the end of the last decade, according to a new analysis looking at public perception of the technology. The paper by Stanford computer science PhD Ethan Fast and Eric Horvitz, technical fellow and a managing director at Microsoft Research, looked at more than three million articles published in the New York Times between January 1986 and May 2016. The study is under review to become a conference paper at the Thirty-First AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence. According to the authors, no other collection of text aimed at a general audience extends so far into the past, making it a good proxy for public opinion. They found that from 1985 to 2009 AI was discussed in somewhere between 5 and 10 out of every 10,000 articles.