AI vs mechanical turks in a race to the bottom. I'm gonna get fat(ter) eating all this popcorn.
AI biz borks US election spending data by using underpaid Amazon Mechanical Turks
Captricity, a company that touts AI software capable of reading text better than people, has been blamed for a bumper crop of data entry errors that misrepresent what many US Senate candidates are actually spending for their campaigns. According to a report published this week from the Center for Public Integrity (CPI), there …
COMMENTS
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Saturday 8th September 2018 09:32 GMT Pascal Monett
"cut turnaround time for election filings by 90 per cent"
Seems it also cuts accuracy by 90%.
Also, don't you just love when government-level info is sent abroad without any control or authorization ?
With all the talk about encryption backdoors and NSA surveillance, you'd think they'd at least keep the data within their own borders.
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Monday 10th September 2018 08:43 GMT jmch
Re: No need for AI; a lottery will suffice.
"No need for AI; a lottery will suffice"
Reminds me of a short story (by Kurt Vonnegut???) where computers / statistics have gotten so powerful / intelligent that they can extrapolate a correct election result from a smaller and smaller pool until that pool shrinks to 1 person, and there is no linger "the voters" but "the voter"
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Monday 10th September 2018 11:14 GMT onefang
Re: No need for AI; a lottery will suffice.
'Reminds me of a short story (by Kurt Vonnegut???) where computers / statistics have gotten so powerful / intelligent that they can extrapolate a correct election result from a smaller and smaller pool until that pool shrinks to 1 person, and there is no linger "the voters" but "the voter"'
May have been Asimov, or maybe they both did one. Isaac Asimov wrote "The Franchise", a short story where that was basically the plot.
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Saturday 8th September 2018 20:14 GMT Dan 55
"With Captricity’s cloud-native Data-as-a-Service platform, the FEC is able to upload scanned filing reports into designated folders securely hosted in the cloud via Amazon S3 [...] The images are then automatically extracted from each folder and uploaded to Captricity. Deep learning algorithms sort and capture the data from all of the documents quickly, securely and with 99.9 percent accuracy."
So now Deep Learning is a Perl script going through directories, calling an OCR program for each file in that directory and then sending the text file output to Mechanical Turk.
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Sunday 9th September 2018 15:50 GMT Anonymous Coward
Plausible deniability
"According to a report published this week from the Center for Public Integrity (CPI), there are "errors in more than 5,900 candidate disclosures representing over $70 million, all of them traceable to the US government’s conversion of paper into electronic data."
This gives candidates plausible deniability and gets around all those pesky campaign finance laws when the numbers don't add up in the unlikely event of an audit.
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Monday 10th September 2018 14:46 GMT disgruntled yank
Re: Why not just fill in a Web form or equivalent directly?
"Not everyone has Internet or even electricity. See for example the Amish. You can't disenfranchise them just because they can't fill in a web form."
Not everybody running for public office? Adding a requirement for filing is not the same thing as disfranchisement. In any case, the Amish will make use of devices that they will not operate. They don't drive automobiles, but I used to see plenty of them on Greyhound buses.
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Monday 10th September 2018 16:45 GMT JohnJacob
Re: Why not just fill in a Web form or equivalent directly?
Actually it's not accurate. The Amish do have electricity. I took a tour of Pennsylvania Dutch country last year and saw solar panels on many houses which blew my mind. I guess the justification is it's not the *electricity* that's the evil influence... it's the connection to the grid. They seem to have clever ways around nearly each and every of their "sacred" rules. It's a society of hotfix patches and workarounds.
So anyhow... let them fill out the web forms as well. ^-^ The way I see it as long as they're uploading info in a form and not browsing the interwebs... they're good to go.
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