You Look Like a Thing and I Love You: How Artificial Intelligence Works and Why It's Making the World a Weirder Place

by Janelle Shane

Without some form of moral oversight, corporations can sometimes act like AIs with faulty reward functions.

Treating a decision as impartial just because it came from an AI is known sometimes as mathwashing or bias laundering.

Building algorithms out of a bunch of subalgorithms may also help, if each subalgorithm reports a human-readable decision.

This latter phenomenon, claiming human performance as AI, is far more common than you’d think. The attraction of AI for many applications is its ability to scale to huge volumes, analyzing hundreds of images or transactions per second. But for very small volumes, it’s cheaper and easier to use humans than to build an AI. In 2019, 40 percent of European startups classified in the AI category didn’t use any AI at all.2