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Overview
Algo News is a by-product of news, language and algorithms.
We constantly rely on machines to make accurate decisions for us, whether
we are online purchasing airline tickets, trading stocks or searching for
Chinese take away. Our reliance on machines has left us being unmindful of
its potential, where even the slightest inaccuracy is readily dismissed as a
malfunction or as bad data.
Algo News subverts this notion by putting the machine through various
stages of malfunction. The computer is programmed to source news content
through different media channels with an algorithm that repeatedly
generates alternate versions of each news item. The new content is published
back into mass media i.e. Twitter, Youtube and the newspaper. Through
these misrepresentations, Algo News opens up spaces for contemplation on
different modes of machine-thought against a backdrop of our own
intentions for the machine.
Tutors: Alex Wilkie, Matthew Plummer-Fernandez and Jiimmy Loizeau
Special thanks to the workshop team and Pete Rogers
Credits: Matthew Plummer-Fernandez, Naho Matsuda and Shih-Yuan Huang
Table of Contents
Overview
Introduction
Background study
Proposal
Prototyping
11
Outcomes
17
Reflection
25
Conclusion
28
References
Introduction
Machine learning systems are a huge part of our lives today. We depend
on them for a majority of our daily interactions like reading the news,
checking the weather, connecting with people, searching for information,
looking for directions, booking tickets, banking or trading stocks. And for
most part, we are only concerned with the success of our transactions,
unperturbed by whats happening inside and outside such systems.
Automation has no doubt made our lives easier but it has been a subject of
debate and controversy. While it brought employment opportunities to
countries like India and China, it deprived others their jobs and livelihood
(Fig. 1). Furthermore, it has also questioned issues around ownership, access
and privacy of data. Despite claims for an open and free web, the Snowden
report shows evidence of bias by people who have specialized access to
peoples private data. This also raises questions about the filter bubble and
the authenticity of information delivered to us. These larger issues are a
consequence of todays ecology of machine learning systems. While
computer scientists have come a long way in inventing new applications for
machine-learning technologies, design still needs to address these issues.
The aim of a machine-learning system is to learn from old and new data sets
and predict accurate future outcomes. It is a valuable asset for assessing the
risks of a future natural calamity, spread of a disease or an upcoming financial
crisis. Arguably, this technology has crept its way into our social and
domestic lives, coaxing us to shop for articles or subscribe to services based
on the predictions it makes for us. There isnt a direct way to explain a
machines predictions and this lack of understanding distances us from
conversing with the machine agreeably. Technologists believe that machines
are only as good as they are programmed to be. Even the slightest
inaccuracy is treated as bad data or as data of low standards. In this sense,
design holds the potential to argue for less stringent and ambiguous ways of
interacting with these systems. The project explores this dimension of
machine learning through a series of interventions.
Background study
Many prevalent technologies such as Google, Facebook and Twitter are
built using machine-learning algorithms. Most of its content is usergenerated and what we see on our computer screens is often filtered by
vague criteria. These filters may be geographical, cultural or racial incorporating a layer of randomness that is hard to pin down. Luciana Parisi,
the author of Contagious Architecture, claims that randomness has become
the condition of programming culture (Fig. 2). However, she does not
suggest that exposing this randomness would start explaining culture and
aesthetics. Instead, it sensitizes us to different modes of computational
thought in generating new possibilities. It breaks open existing ideas behind
algorithmic expectation.
Proposal
Drawing from literature and contemporary discussions on machine
learning, it was necessary to highlight the algorithmic processes behind these
systems. One way of addressing this may entail revealing the changes in
attributes (e.g. age, gender in a profiling system, Fig. 5). It exposes the
machines prediction in real-time for us to arrive at different interpretations.
talks to other bots on Twitter (Fig. 6). In this sense, the machine reveals its
process of making random associations by interacting with other algorithms.
The agency of the machine slowly becomes apparent as it moves away from
doing what is expected. This idea of programming machines to perform
something unintentional started to tie in with the analogy of taking drugs to
alter the function of the human body. This led to an exploration of how these
algorithmic drugs could play out in the real world and the meanings
generated by the production of alternate content.
There are plenty of machine learning applications in various contexts to
experiment with an algorithmic invention. For example, online shopping is
huge area that keeps a track of individual profiles, their browsing histories
and purchase orders. Similarly, social-networking sites know who our friends
are, where we went on vacation and who is stalking us. In addition, machine
learning is used for high-frequency trading systems, transportation, brand
loyalty cards and security systems. A large focus of machine learning is
invested into search engines, multilingual translation applications and email
filtering applications.
In the beginning, it was interesting to think about applying machine learning
to cultural artifacts like the Holy Bible or Shakespearean sonnets. Initial ideas
wheeled around performing a faith analysis on Twitter feeds using the Bible
as training data. This idea was spurred by existing sentiment analysis
Prototyping
Early on, basic prototypes were created using simple tools to visualize
ideas. For example, online recommendations from Amazons browsing
history were downloaded as images and converted into a fast-paced GIF
image. The idea was to randomize the act of browsing and purchasing items
while commenting on Amazons recent one-click-buy feature. Here users
may click on any item in the GIF and purchase it without notice. This
prototype spurred conversations on making dashboards that display users
browsing histories and machine recommendations in momentary flashes. It
also questioned what other peoples GIFs may look like and who has access
to it. Can a persons GIF image get sold back on Amazon (Fig. 7)?
The same idea was replicated with Facebook images. A person may
unintentionally Like somebodys photo in a GIF image on his or her timeline
(Fig. 8). Such an intervention would start showing visible changes in their
future recommendations and Facebook wall activity.
Another prototype was created using Mozillas X-ray goggles. At the Mozilla
Festival 2014, a workshop was held to educate people about web literacy by
asking them to remix the TATE website. Mozillas webmaker tools like X-ray
goggles and Popcorn maker allows anyone to break down the HTML of a
webpage and remix it to create different content. Having attended this
workshop, it triggered the idea of changing the original content of a BBC
news page into a mistranslated one (Fig. 9). Google Translate was used to
translate this page from English to Telugu and back to English. Google
Translate is a popular multilingual translation service that uses machine
intelligence to learn from all kinds of human-translated text content on the
web. It attempts to make intelligent approximations of the actual sentence
through context-recognition and pattern matching. However, it is still quite
difficult for someone to explain why the machine chooses specific words or
sentences against many possibilities.
This idea of a mistranslation was initially limited to just text content. In the
next iteration, it was combined with finding substitute images using Googles
SearchByImage tool (Fig. 10). It allows a user to find similar images by
comparing it to the attributes of the original image. It uses an imagerecognition algorithm that uses machine learning.
The third prototype included the use of IFTTT (If This Then That) and
Facebook. IFTTT is a web-based service that allows other services to talk to
each other by creating algorithmic recipes between them. For example,
IFTTT was programmed to search for the terms eBay and Wearables on
Twitter and to post a new item containing the keyword on a Facebook profile
page (Fig. 11). A fake Facebook profile called Anna Roberts was created in
order to experiment with different keywords and outcomes. However, there
was no interaction with this profile or with the posts generated through IFTT.
In fact, Facebooks algorithms do not allow more than 25 posts per day from
the same source (IFTTT). This prototype was considered a failure because the
idea was to understand if social media interaction could influence ecommerce using ambiguous methods such as this prototype.
Given the time frame for the project, it was necessary to decide how much
work to take on. Drawing from the discussion and feedback, the most
promising prototype was the mistranslation of the BBC news story. This idea
carried the potential to put the content through several stages of mistranslations while also tying it to Google Translates machine-learning system.
The next stage of prototyping was to push this idea by translating a piece of
content several times, until its meaning starts to change. In order to put this
into a working logic, a news headline was translated into languages ranging
from the east (i.e. Chinese, Japanese, Hindi, Arabic, Russian) to the west
(German, Spanish, Italian, French, Portuguese). Each time the sentence was
translated from English to the language and back to English. When this idea
was explained to peers, they related it to the game Chinese Whispers. The
outcome of this experiment was amusing while being critical of the content
we consume as users of the web. To automate the recipe, a program was
written in Python (the programming language) with the help of open source
APIs. In this case, Goslate was used, which is a free Python API for Googles
translation services (Fig. 12).
With the code, it became extremely simple to input a text and get instant
results at different stages of translation (Fig. 13).
Outcomes
At this point, it was interesting to start imagining how these mistranslations
play out in the real world. The outcomes could act as agents for spurring
conversations around machine capacities. Moreover, the context of news also
brought with it the potential to implement the algorithm in different channels
of news media.
The first outcome originated in Twitter. Twitter is a micro-blogging service
that allows people to post short pieces of texts with a 140-character limit.
Twitter also relies on machine learning to recommend relevant profiles to
follow. In spite of many twitter profiles being real, there are a fair number of
automated twitter bots that post tweets, reply to tweets or retweet existing
tweets automated algorithms. In the Twitter universe, keywords are crucial for
prompting interaction between users. This insight resulted in experimenting
with the algorithm on Twitter. The twitter profile was titled Algo News and
the result of 10 mistranslations is posted as a tweet (Fig. 15). To accomplish
this, a new twitter profile was created with a developer identity. This helped
procure an API key and the required authentication codes. These codes were
used in a Twitter API for Python called Twython which allows a Twitter user
to post tweets from a computer program (Fig. 14).
The source for original twitter content is The Guardian. The Guardians tone
is neutral and unobtrusive compared to other news sources. It was interesting
to examine how the machine starts to interpret news in varied tones after
several mistranslations. Algo News started receiving immediate attention
with the keywords it generated. It produced about 400 tweets, of which
many were retweeted and favorited by unfamiliar users. However, the
number of followers has been fluctuating based on how many users realized
Algo News is actually an algorithmic bot (Fig. 16).
The second outcome was a direct result of the tutoring sessions. One of the
tutors felt strongly about how this algorithm plays out in the real world
through physical artifacts. As the context was news media, it was obvious that
a mistranslated newspaper could be a potential outcome of the project. In
this case, even though a newspaper is physical, the mistranslated content
suggests something thats gone terribly wrong in the printing system or
before the content was processed. This seemingly familiar but bizarre sense
of reading a mistranslated newspaper was intriguing to pursue. It also
provided the opportunity to not just present text content but also images,
using the Google SearchByImage tool. To take it further, more than one
newspaper may be presented, each one different from the other by a layer of
mistranslation (Fig. 17). The idea was to suggest more than something gone
terribly wrong and instead reveal a machines capacity in generating many
versions of the same content in a mundane format like the newspaper.
The content of the video was about a male scientist who wore a shirt showing
scantily clad women. The scientist, Matt Taylor, apologized for his conduct
and spoke about his priorities for the space probe that just landed on a
Figure 21: Showing four versions of captioning for the same video
For exhibiting the prototypes, it was important to address how all the 3
outcomes were tied by the same mistranslation algorithm. One of the tutors
suggested that I buy a Raspberry Pi and let the Python algorithm run from it.
The hope was that the physical aspect of the Raspberry Pi would provoke
discussion about what these algorithmic bots look like and where it resides.
However, there was a danger in not being able to explain what the Raspberry
Pi does. A well-illustrated diagram of how the algorithm works with the
Raspberry Pi was a possible solution to address the issue. Furthermore, the
initial idea was to spread the newspapers out on the table provided. But the
tutors suggested other interesting ways of exhibiting it. It was also
recommended to make a scrapbook of cutouts containing original news
content used for making the algorithmic newspaper. This was suggested to
make the connection between the mistranslated newspaper and the original
content clearer. The mistranslation algorithm was also combined with a Flickr
API that posts tweets with the first image it finds upon searching the
translated text (Fig. 22). This was a welcome addition to the text content that
the algorithm was already generating.
Reflections
During the process, several biases and challenges were brought to the
forefront. To begin with, it was difficult to judge whether certain word
choices by the machine were due to foreign grammar or because of the
machine associations. For example, in this following set of mistranslations,
the word heroines gets lost in the second translation i.e. Chinese. Is this a
machines doing or does the word heroin not exist in Chinese?
Ellie Irving's top 10 quiet heroes and heroines
Ten quiet hero by Ellis Owen
10 quiet hero in Ellis Owen
Ellis Owen 10 quiet hero
Ellis Owen 10 quiet hero
10 Ellis Owen quiet hero
10 Ellis Owen silent hero
10 Ellis Owen unsung heroes
10 Ellis Owen unsung heroes
10 Ellis Owen unsung heroes
10 Ellis Owen unsung heroes
In another case, the word horrible was translated to the word awesome.
This happened around the third translation, which is the language Hindi.
Going back to Google Translate, it seemed as though the word horrible was
used in the context of being fierce and as a result, the word awesome.
Apocalypse now: horrifying scenes from our ravaged planet
Apocalypse: Horrifying scenes from our ravaged planet
Apocalypse: our horrible scene from the devastated planet
Doom: our awesome view of the devastated planet
Doom: our stunning view of the devastation of the planet
Destination: our breathtaking view of the devastation of the planet
Destination: our breathtaking view of the devastation of the planet
Destination: our breathtaking view of the devastation of the planet
Destination: our view breathtaking devastation of the planet
Destination: We have a breathtaking view of the destruction of the planet Earth
Destination: We have a stunning view of the destruction of the planet Earth
From an exhibition viewpoint, it was hard to approach the topic machinelearning, algorithms or bots, assuming the audience have no idea of what
it all means. Where does the explanation begin and end? Also, there were
certain assumptions made about viewers being able to understand this idea
of machine-altered mistranslations without providing a reference to the
original content. However, with the tutors guidance, a reference to the
original was provided.
Furthermore, exploring a topic like machine learning through design requires
a focus on ongoing technological research with a combination of
prototyping. The outcomes may or may not bear potential for devising future
interactions. In this sense, the outcomes are more likely to be research
devices in the way it allows subjectivities to be performed by people who
interact with it.
Conclusion
The three outcomes of this project i.e. the newspapers, the video and the
Twitter bot are experiments in exploring how machine learning interventions
could play out in real life and what potential interactions it can offer. In the
future, these news-generating bots can be pushed further to create content
such as news websites or to create AI systems that interact with other newsbots or with other users. It also has a future in creating interfaces that allows
users to interact with multiple versions of a single story. How does a user
choose from them? The randomness of the machine reveals new potential as
better tools are invented to interact with these systems. It is also important to
mention the critical role of open-source developers in allowing designers and
technologists to creatively engage with technology and being able to
imagine and prototype ideas for future expectations. Luciana Parisi mentions
that Randomness is a condition of programming culture. However, in the
context of this project, this randomness extends beyond programming
culture, and into our physical lives, into who we are, and what we know. It is
indeed crucial to accept randomness as a part of our mundane lives and
design ways to define the scope and expectations for these technologies
through such explorations.
References
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