What is the point of changing the headline of an article like this? The headline was an accurate summary of the contents ("THE FRAUDULENT CLAIMS MADE BY IBM ABOUT WATSON AND AI"). Maybe you agree, maybe you don't. But the current headline is just wrong.
From the article:
> I will say it clearly: Watson is a fraud. I am not saying that it can’t crunch words, and there may well be value in that to some people. But the ads are fraudulent.
That's what this is about. Not "Claims made by IBM about Watson and AI."
I changed it in a bit of a rush earlier. Note the word "unless" in the site guideline: Please use the original title, unless it is misleading or linkbait. "Fraudulent" in the title was guaranteed to provoke objections—you might not consider it misleading/linkbait but other readers would.
Normally we look for more accurate and neutral language in the article text to use as a replacement title. Now that I'm not in a rush, it's clear that the subtitle contains such language, so we'll use that instead.
I wish click bait was more well defined. In this case, I feel the original title summarizes the entire claim made in the article. Using the title "Claims made by..." sounds like it'll be an article summarizing the claims made by AI and Watson, rather than a push back on those claims.
I'll go ahead and define clickbait using a simplified and possibly anthropomorphized version of information theory.
First:
- The more improbable a message is, the more information it contains, assuming the message is true
- If the message is untrue it contains no information
- If a message is already known by everyone it contains no information
Not Clickbait:
If a message is surprising (seemingly unlikely or previously unknown), and true, then it contains high information, and will be very likely to be clicked. This is not just a good thing, it's the most optimal thing!
Clickbait:
If a message is surprising and untrue, it will also very likely be clicked if the user cannot easily determine that the message is untrue. The user may then be disappointed when they discover the message actually contained no information because it was false. Incidentally, false messages will always have a high probability of appearing to be high information messages, because they will often appear to have the least likelihood.
Incidentally, this is (in my opinion) the theoretical problem of fake news. It will always appear to be high information to those unable to determine if it's true or false. In other words, it will appear to be of the highest value, when really it has no value (or even negative value if you look at the system level rather than just information level).
I disagree, and do not believe the title is linkbaity/sensational at all, and find it problematic that the title was changed. It is an accurate description of the author’s position, which is that the claims made by IBM are fraudulent. Holding a position isn’t linkbaity or sensationalism.
A linkbaity or sensational title would have been “you won’t believe what IBM claims”.
Exactly this. I've been uncomfortable with this trend for a while now, where everything gets labeled "clickbait" and there's a thread of resentment if an article does anything other than lay out dry facts as efficiently as possible.
The pendulum has swung too far. This wasn't clickbait, it was a fair and accurate summary of the full piece. Flag the entire post if you think it's inherently inflammatory, downvote, ban it if you're an admin, but this title had no business being edited.
Perhaps a more NPOV [neutral point-of-view] way to reframe the original would be "Claims made by IBM about Watson and AI considered fraudulent" - thus it is no longer advertising an opinion as implicitly true in the headline, but simply representing the article for what it is.
I'm sure you're right about the why, but I don't believe this was a judgement call, I believe it was wrong. The current headline is misleading (if the purpose of a headline is to provide information about the contents of the full post).
Questions about whether the entire article is misleading should be addressed via discussion in the comments or, if it's egregiously wrong, flagged/downvoted/removed.
You should the CEO’s of big companies bragging with big buzz words like “AI”, “cognitive”.
The truth is very few people understand the current state of AI and it’s limits. Most of the fancy papers in Arxiv are based on NN’s which are just essentially vector algebraic math.
Yes, we made huge leaps in image labeling and speech to text but current AI is a far cry from the full abilities of human brain reasoning and comprehension.
The reality is people will say whatever to make a sale / get VC funding.
The current economy is running on greed. When the bubble bursts, people will get hurt. Then the economy runs on fear. Fear that AI is hype.
IBM has always been about hype. They are riding on the jeopardy wave and exploiting the greed.
You can also argue that even the leaps we've managed to make in machine learning (a phrase I prefer over 'AI' not least because it includes the reminder-word 'machine') are mostly quantitative rather than qualitative leaps. Almost anything you can think of that's 'better' lately seems to be mostly thanks to 'more' -- more data collected in one place available for training/processing (thanks to large centralized surveillance companies), and the ability to process more data faster (thanks to faster hardware, and more of it, owned by those selfsame large centralized surveillance companies). We've seen a lot of optimizations and interesting research within the existing paradigm but we haven't seen a serious qualitative breakthrough the likes of which would justify this kind of hype.
"just essentially vector algebraic math" -- True, but only in the sense that anything done by a computer is just iterated Boolean logic. Yet, Wikipedia and Grand Theft Auto and Mathematica have emergent properties beyond the obvious things that Boolean logic can do. So the fact that neural networks are based on vector algebra doesn't prove that they aren't capable of impressive things.
I mean to say the there are tons of problems NNs aren’t good for. If we are on the journey to discover GAI super algorithm that is smart enough to learn very quickly without a shit ton of data, I’d say we still have a long way to go.
Anyone claiming they solved cognitive reasoning with a bunch of NNs stacked together in a black box is probably lying to themselves.
From the article:
> I will say it clearly: Watson is a fraud. I am not saying that it can’t crunch words, and there may well be value in that to some people. But the ads are fraudulent.
That's what this is about. Not "Claims made by IBM about Watson and AI."