DINT 110 - Glue on your pizza, anyone? Google makes us beta test yet another AI feature
This time, Google's AI Overview feature achieved less than stellar results but the way Google handled the issue is in line with their other AI solutions.
News Quickies
Beauty tech startup Parfait signed college basketball star Raven Johnson of the South Carolina Gamecocks to a Name Image and Likeness (NIL) deal. NILs allow college athletes to earn money from sponsorships without losing their eligibility to play sports for their institute of higher learning. Parfait uses AI to analyze an image of a customer’s head to create a custom-fit wig.
Also of note: Serena Williams’ Serena Ventures provided part of Parfait’s $5 million funding round in 2022. Raven Johnson previously signed NIL deals with other tech firms including shipping tech startup Shipt, dating app Bumble, and fintech firm Poetryy Finance. (AfroTech)
Image of Raven Johnson, basketball player for the South Carolina Gamecocks
Reuters reports TikTok is prepping a U.S.-only version of the app to dodge U.S. lawmakers looking to ban the app due to its ownership by China-based ByteDance. Last month U.S. President Joe Biden signed a bill into law that called for the banning of TikTok in the U.S. if the firm remains in the hands of Chinese owners.
While ByteDance called Reuters’ reporting false and inaccurate, the firm didn’t state which parts, if any, of the reporting was untrue. Meanwhile, TikTok engineers continue their work to separate millions of lines of TikTok’s code to make TikTok-US a reality. Reuters’ source says there’s concern about app performance.
HBO just released a new series “MoviePass, Movie Crash” recounting how forces of racism and bias pushed two Black tech startup founders out of their own company. Stacy Spikes and Hamet Watt founded MoviePass but mismanagement by venture capitalists led to the firm’s eventual implosion. Check out the trailer below:
Featured Essay
Glue in pizza sauce, anyone? Google’s AI Overview Falls Flat, Leading to Scruting of AI’s ‘Gatekeepers’
Google something and you’re bound to see an AI-generated summary of the search results below. Cool, right? Saves lots of time and effort. Gives you a bird’s eye view of your query. Google is still in the search engine game.
Except, that’s not what’s happening right now.
Google’s new search results feature “AI Overview” produces odd and sometimes dangerous information in the summaries it produces.
The pains of being forced into beta testing for a billion-dollar firm
Feedback from voices on LinkedIn seem to repeat what the tech industry already knows: GenAI isn’t ready for prime time and users remain beta testers instead of beneficiaries of well-tested, glitch-less features.
Others all but admit to the raw AI trend sweeping tech. Antonio Ferreira of Alcon posits that these setbacks are to be expected.
The case against tech startup motto ‘move fast and break things’
This atmosphere of turning users into test cases leads to dangerous territory and serves as an object lesson against “move fast and break things” tech culture. This is especially true when the things that get broken are lives, families, careers, along with wealth-building and housing opportunities.
Dr. Joy Buolamwini looked directly at Sam Altman during a Commonwealth Club live interview late last year. As she looked at him, Buolamwini mentioned the phrase “who gets to decide what happens and who has the power to shape what is adopted.” It was a chilling example of speaking truth to power since Altman is the CEO of OpenAI, the creator of ChatGPT, a well-known GenAI platform.
Check out the clip here:
Buolamwini speaks about being ex-coded, being denied opportunities because one is unaware of the algorithms being designed to exclude them. She also mentions the coded gaze, which Buolamwini defines as the evidence of encoded discrimination and exclusion in tech products.
Google didn’t actually fail but it didn’t ace the test either
I decided to conduct a short test of AI Overview’s ability to help me escape the coded gaze. The first test, I admit, is a softball:
“are Blacks overrepresented in tech”
Google AI Overview responds:
What really stood out during my test weren’t the responses. AI Overview only shows up for certain search queries. It appears the solution to Google’s problem with AI Overview isn’t to improve the accuracy of the system but rather to only give responses to certain queries, seemingly ones it is confident it can answer appropriately.
For instance, the query “Is AI improving” received an AI Overview response. But when I added the words “its racism problem” the system defaulted back to the traditional search results experience.
Deferring the problem isn’t the solution
This is classic Google. The firm pushes the issue down the road, promises a solution but really side-steps the issue. We covered how the firm addressed its ‘Black people are gorillas’ debacle with its Google Photos feature and their fix was to simply remove primates from their query results.
What’s the right path forward? It’s somewhat unclear, except to say that independent voices matter. It’s quite difficult to tell the unvarnished truth about critical issues when the risk is getting demoted or fired. Having a diverse room of engineers isn’t necessarily the answer. Maybe, just maybe, having an open atmosphere for feedback and a sincere desire to share leadership can lead to innovation we all benefit from.
Palate Cleanser
‘Just so I understand …’
