Artificial Intelligence Being Wrong

I recently visited Alaska to do some skiing and spent time away from my home ski areas Snowbird and Alta. First off, Alaska is a whole new kind of cold when it comes to skiing. I'm glad I opted to bring my warmest gear. 

While driving to the airport after a day of skiing at Aleyeska, I got a call from my ski buddy Jim. He said that AI told him Snowbird would be closing for midweek skiing at the beginning of April. Normally Snowbird stays open daily until it gets close to the end of the season and then it closes during the week and is only open on weekends. That normally doesn't happen until May. This is important as my buddy Jim will be coming to Utah for a week in April to do some skiing and that is kind of tough to do if the ski area is closed.

Yesterday I visited Snowbird and made sure to ask around if they announced any changes in their schedule. They have not. This begs the question how AI came up with a false schedule change. The answer is very important as it will help you understand why AI often provides the wrong answer to questions.

There are multiple ways that AI came up with an answer to when Snowbird would switch to weekend only skiing. The simplest answer is someone speculated on a date and the AI found such a posting and incorporated it into its knowledge base. This often happens in real life. Someone will state a guess as fact and we all believe the person. My dad once told me that magnets are created by hitting a piece of iron with a hammer really hard. While that may be one way to create a magnet, that is not how they are made. I recently corrected his misunderstanding. Doing the same thing with AI is a bit more involved.

Another way that AI can come up with false knowledge is through inference. We are having a particularly warm winter here in the western United States. When temperatures get above a certain point, snow starts melting quickly. This week we are expecting record highs and AI could recognize that when the average temperature gets above a certain point, Snowbird switches to weekend-only skiing. Unfortunately temperature is not how Snowbird determines when people are done skiing. They look at hotel reservations at their lodges as well as a number of other factors and will try to keep the daily schedule as long as Mother Nature allows.

The important thing to gather from this post is that Artificial Intelligence is often wrong. I don't know how many times I have asked Google a question only to have it spit back the wrong answer. While I have not kept close statistical records, I feel like I get the right answer from AI only about 20% of the time. It may point me in the right direction but I always verify the answer and augment what I am told with real human intelligence.