A People’s Guide to AI by Mimi Onuoha

• When you hear the words “Artificial Intelligence”, what are the first four things that come to your mind?
  • Innovation and problem solving
  • Dystopia, Fiction, books, media
  • Ethics, use of AI
  • Avatars
• AI represents a quest to imitate the human brain
• Human Intelligence
  • Naturalist
    • discriminate among living things
  • Musical
    • discern pitch, rhythm, timbre, and tone
  • Logical-mathematical/Computational
    • calculate, quantify, consider propositions and hypotheses, mathematical operations
  • Existential
    • deep questions and human existence
  • Interpersonal
    • understand and interact with others (forms of communication, tone, mood, perspectives)
  • Bodily-kinesthetic
    • manipulate objects and physical skills
  • Linguistic
    • think in words and use language to express complex meanings
  • Intrapersonal
    • understand one's thoughts and feelings
  • Spatial
    • think in three dimensions, imagination
• Adding AI to existing things, extension of what we already do
• Algorithms
  • Building blocks of computer programs
  • Takes in defined inputs and produces defined output

Excavating AI

• Images in AI
  • How do computers recognize photos?
• Training AI
  • Training sets
    • collection of images (labeled) and categories
  • Three Layers:
    1. The overall taxonomy (the aggregate of classes and their hierarchical nesting, if applicable)
    2. The individual classes (the singular categories that images are organized into, e.g., "apple")
    3. Each individually labeled image (i.e., an individual picture that has been labeled as an apple)
  • Synset (cognitive synonyms)
  • general concepts to more specific ones
    • artifact > furnishing > furniture > seat > chair

ImageNet Sample Images:

• Only recognizes one thing in image, or main thing (Person holding shark, only recognizes shark)

Emoji Scavenger Hunt:

• I played this a few times. To get the answer correct, the object had to be very clear (?). For example, I got backpack as one of the emojis/objects to find and it would not recognize the backpack. Either because the shape is odd, but it was unidentifiable, even when I went up close and flipped my backpack around. Similar with tshirt, could not recognize. Other shapes with distinct features were easier (like Keyboard).

Image Classifier:

Classified a bengal cat i downloaded from internet… Labeled as tiger cat (not correct) with very low confidence. Other labels were of wild cats.

I then upload photos of my own cats, both were labeled as Egyptian cats ( I am assuming Egyptian maus, they do look similar to bengals) with different confidences