How Algorithms Create and Prevent Fake News by Noah Giansiracusa

Author:Noah Giansiracusa
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781484271551
Publisher: Apress

Summary

The polygraph has a long and winding history, starting with work of Marston (the creator of Wonder Woman) and his wife Holloway, and also a Berkeley police officer named Larson, that took place between 1915 and 1921. Marston convinced the government to investigate the efficacy of his invention, but the official response was skepticism rooted in common sense and historical insight. Determined to make a revolutionary impact, Marston attempted to use his device to establish the innocence of a defendant in a 1923 murder trial, but his efforts were dismissed by the court and resulted instead in the Frye standard that still stands as the law today: expert witness testimony is admissible in court only if the technology it is based on is generally accepted by the scientific community. Polygraphs did not pass that test then, and neither do the new AI-powered algorithmic variants today.

Nevertheless, interest in AI lie detection has surged in the past few years. Some methods rely on video, others audio, and others text alone. They all suffer from a lack of transparency, exaggerated claims of accuracy, an unnervingly high rate of false positives, and bias that disproportionately impacts minority populations. This has not stopped them from being used for employment screening and fraud detection and occasionally even in the courtroom (despite the Frye standard), and from being trialed in airport security and other settings. Given all the flaws, overzealous commercialization, corporate secrecy, and embarrassing lack of even an attempt at scientific foundations, it does not appear that the polygraph—even when reinvented with AI—will ever be able to detect lies with the consistency needed to rein in fake news. Instead, the mythical ability to use fancy technology to peer into the mind and reliably detect deception is itself the fake news in this story.

If we can’t use algorithmic lie detectors to unmask fake news and get to the truth in controversial matters, perhaps we should just do what hundreds of millions of people do every day: Google it. But be careful—there too the algorithms behind the scenes systematically distort our perception of reality, as you will see in the next chapter.

Footnotes

1“The Polygraph and Lie Detection,” National Research Council, 2003: https://www.nap.edu/catalog/10420/the-polygraph-and-lie-detection.

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