Juvenile Boobies

This is, at first glance, a rather cute little story about a misunderstanding, but it illustrates a broader point.

Christmas Island, in the Indian Ocean, is not Ibiza or St. Tropez.  It is not covered by huge, luxury hotels.  It does not try to attract drunken college students on Spring Break.  It’s main attraction is that it is a nesting place for many rare birds.  Among them are several varieties of boobies.

Juvenile Boobies

Yes, there are birds called boobies.  There are also birds called tits, by the way.  Boobies are bigger than tits.

Anyway, the island’s tourism board put some photos up on facebook with the tag line “Here are some great shots of juvenile boobies.”  It was perfectly clear, from the photos, that they were photos of birds and not the breasts of underage human females.

Facebook took them down.  Which I could understand, if they hadn’t understood.  If they’d seen the line ‘juvenile boobies’ and said “whoaaa, gotta take that down, that’s child porn” it would be an understandable mistake.  But no, they saw the pictures and they decided they just weren’t accepting the phrase “juvenile boobies” because it could have a different meaning.

I don’t see what harm that would do.  Maybe some sleazy, perverted old men might have clicked on it, hoping to see some young tit, and been horribly disappointed.

It reminds me of a party I was at many years ago when a girl came downstairs and said “Hey, who wants a blow job?”  I knew it wasn’t going to be for real, but I followed her up the steps because, hey, you never know, and there she blasted me with a blow dryer and collapsed in drunken hysterics.  Despite my disappointment, it was kind of funny.

I would have understood facebook’s position if a machine had made the mistake.  If a computerized moderation system was programmed to not accept phrases like juvenile boobies, bitch, cock, and ass, then all sorts of posts which might be of great importance to dog breeders and farmers might be rejected, but it would be easy to see why.

But this mistake was made by a human being.

I think the problem is with what kind of human beings wind up being moderators on social media websites.  They are (feel free to correct me if I’m wrong) people who are good with computers but maybe lack people  skills.  They don’t usually get jokes, they are not good at nuance, and they probably almost never get laid.  It’s a paradox.

The Turing Test is what will determine when computers have achieved artificial intelligence.  When a person talking to a chatbot cannot tell that it is a chatbot, the threshold will have been crossed.

We are moving in the other direction.  Although there are no computer programs which can yet successfully emulate human beings, there are apparently plenty of human beings who are capable of acting like computers.