This is getting absolutely nuts. Just a week after Facebook got busted for allowing advertisers to target topics like “Jew haters” and “How to burn Jews,” a reporter found that the company used an image that said “I will rape you” to invite her friends to Instagram. There was a death threat in there, too.
Mark Zuckerberg disingenuously poses as a friendly critic of algorithms. That’s how he implicitly contrasts Facebook with his rivals across the way at Google. Over in Larry Page’s shop, the algorithm is king, a cold, pulseless ruler. There’s not a trace of life force in its recommendations and very little apparent…
Researchers at MIT have developed deep-learning algorithm that can compile a list of ingredients and even recommend recipes after looking at photos of food. The artificially intelligent system still needs some fine tuning, but this tool could eventually help us learn to cook, count calories, and track our eating…
After four and a half years of not speaking to my mom I’ve learned to stay away from social media on Mother’s Day.
Like an athlete trying to push their body to its extreme limits, artist Damien Henry was curious what would happen if you asked a predictive algorithm to calculate the next frame of video in a sequence, again and again and again, over 100,000 times.
Harassment on Twitter is a very real problem, not just celebrities, but for regular users too. In order to help curb abuse on the platform (a fact that has reportedly kept the company from being sold), Twitter introduced a new feature last week that would put abusers in “time out” if they tweet offensive content at…
Revision wars on Wikipedia amongst human editors is an all-too-common occurrence, but new research from the UK shows that similar online battles are being waged between the site’s software robots.
The British pound suffered a “flash crash” earlier this morning in which it plummeted six percent against the US dollar within a matter of minutes. All signs point to high frequency stock trading as the culprit—and possibly a single algorithm.
Social media can already give others insight into your personal life and mental state (even if you don’t want them to), but according to a recent study, even something as small as your Instagram filter choices can be enlightening.
I’m a writer, so I’ll always have a place in my heart for the handwritten page (partially because I believe in romantic ideas about writing, but also because there is no way I’m using my phone to type out anything beyond a few words).
Online harassment is a serious, but tough problem to try and solve. There is a need for a new system that can ease the burden on moderators who have to comb through those reports. As someone who was once responsible for doing that for a local news station (a much smaller venue than, say, Twitter), I can sympathize…
Artist Petros Vrellis works comfortably in that strange medium where technology meets classical art. In 2012, he created an interactive van Gogh painting that we wish was an app (he made it an app a month later). For his latest piece, Vrellis uses a computer algorithm and a circular loom to create stunning El…
An algorithm that predicts bestselling books has awarded a perfect score to The Circle by Dave Eggers, a book that just so happens to be a dystopian satire of life in Silicon Valley. Hmm.
Do you get squeamish when someone dies on Game of Thrones? Or maybe you’re worried your favorite character is about to get killed, and you can’t bear to watch. Researchers at MIT have developed an algorithm that can predict what’s going to happen next in a video, giving you an opportunity to look away first.
After spending a year going through pro-ISIS groups on social media, researchers have come up with an algorithm they think might predict attacks. If only it were that easy.
We all know there’s a racial disparity in US criminal prosecutions—but imagine if a computer algorithm was being used to insert even more bias into the criminal justice system. According to a damning new report from ProPublica, that’s exactly what’s happening in many states around the country.
Every social media platform has bottom feeders. You know the ones: the fake teen pornbots, the meme factories, the personal brand trumpeters—the spammers. They come in many different forms, but they are all categorically bad, and they make the experience of actually using the platform slightly worse every time they…
Much to the chagrin of anyone who hates algorithms, it appears that Twitter’s new timeline—the one that displays tweets based on importance rather than chronology—is now the default setting for all users.
In a move that should surprise exactly no one, Instagram is testing an algorithm-based newsfeed for its users, similar to what you see on Facebook. And according to a blog post from the company, they plan to force this change on everyone in the long run.
You shouldn’t always believe your eyes—because there’s much out there that you can’t see. A new, free algorithm created by UCLA engineers enables you to discern details in images that would be impossible to observe any other way.
