2.

YouTube and Marching Learning

In the beginning of the internet, people used to program algorithms on their own due to their lack of
understanding of artificial intelligence. However, as time passes, more and more people use machine
learning as a means to create more and more complex algorithms that can do jobs better than what
humans can program and thus is slowly being integrated into the internet.

2.2 Benefits of YouTube’s Machine Learning algorithm to Machine Learning research and development

The areas that were previously used for artificial intelligence and machine learning research were
expensive and costly to operate. Using the real world as a testing area would be expensive and too
much work if fully managed by humans.

One of the areas where machine learning was being applied to was the military. Performing research on
this field would prove to be a very costly because of the equipment and personnel required for the task.
However, as time passes, technology will inevitably improve over time and so will the fields utilizing it.

One of such field would be the websites on the internet. The internet has become a part of our day to
day life and due to that alone, companies utilizing the internet with their websites have been gaining a
relative stable growth. This allows companies to be one of the perfect candidates in order to improve
machine learning because they too utilize machine learning.

Machine learning can be used to understand human behavior and improve the research being done on
its development. It is already being used to understand human behavior by website all over the internet.
Examples of such are YouTube, Facebook, Twitter etc. It is a less expensive route compared to
researching in the “real world” and additionally, updated data can acquired easily compared to when
doing it in the real world because everyone uses the internet in their day to day life.

2.1 Problems regarding YouTube’s Machine learning algorithm.

Nowadays, a lot of websites are using machine learning to develop algorithms in order to automate or
improve the way they do thing. They are mainly used to ensure that the user will stay in their website
for a long period of time or to ensure that the user will generate them money by showing the ads that
they want to see.

The Although YouTube has been using it’s algorithm for a long time, there have been a lot of incidents
where, because of the algorithm, videos in YouTube that are actually education or political, are being
demonetized or being removed from the channels it belonged to because the algorithm deemed it to be
inappropriate or not “PG” enough.

In order to explain YouTube algorithm’s shortcoming, we must first understand the criteria of the
algorithm. The criteria that the algorithm must follow or aim to reach are the following: what people
watch or don’t watch, how much time people spend watching videos, how quickly a video’s popularity
snowballs, how new a video is, how often the channel upload a video, how much time people spend on
the platform, how many like, dislikes, shares and engagement it has and the not interested feedback.

The main issue regarding the YouTube algorithm is that it doesn’t understand context. Machine Learning
is still not at the level where it can learn context and because of that, it might make mistakes that
human wont. The New York Times reported that the YouTube algorithm was encouraging pedophiles to
watch videos of partially-clothed children. To most people, these videos are just children having fun at
the pool but for the pedophiles, it’s something more.

Human intuition can generally recognize the motive behind people’s viewing habit and can step in to
discourage that and is what would probably happen if humans were the one recommending the videos
and not a computer. But to the algorithm, as long as it can serve up a video that a person will watch, it
believes that it is a job well done.

Additionally because it cannot understand context, there a lot of videos that are being demonetized for
being educational or political, Based on the criteria I showed before, the video’s like and dislike ratio is
important for the algorithm but for political videos where there are usually a massive amount of dislike
due to the conflicting opinions of the owner of the channel and the viewers, the algorithm will either
demonetize your video or ensure that your videos will have less view and will be recommended less
than other “safe” videos to watch. News videos are also not immune to such treatment because of the
“not safe” content they show on their channel. Thing like murder and rape are considered something
that people would not want to watch and thus the algorithm will demonetize or remove your video from
YouTube.