Why AI Technology Can't Handle the Truth

Last month, Facebook's "Trending" tab featured Megyn Kelly as a topic, displaying hoax news items claiming she had been fired by Fox News. Many critics pointed out that the mistake occurred shortly after the social network decided to shed the editorial team in charge of overseeing trending topics. The company had gone almost entirely algorithmic with the feature, and the move had almost immediately failed. A Quartz postmortem ascribed the incident to an "inmates running the asylum" scenario. The algorithm that surfaced the news based its selection on Facebook users' activity, and for reasons of policy or practice human overseers had neglected to correct the mistake.