Out of control AI

So, today Twitter admitted their feed algorithm is biased in favour of rightwing politicians (nothing surprising there really). They don't understand why this is. Ouch! Artificial Intelligence is trained on real world data. If your real world data has biases, so will your AI. Unfortunately all real world data has biases. This is why you have suitably trained and qualified professionals making the important decisions and controls in place to try to ensure these decisions are fair and unbiased. If Twitter admit to having problems, imagine what is going on in Facebook's algorithms!

It is about time we legislated against the use of uncontrolled algorithms determining what we do and don't see in our feeds. In fact until we get a better understanding of the algorithms controlling the news we get to read, the feeds should simply be chronological by default. Perhaps we can give users the possibility to change this, but only they have been warned about and accepted the consequences.