# Things AI could easily do but "they're" too lazy to program it **URL:** \ **Category:** In My Humble Opinion\ **Created:** [February 13, 2021, 10:24pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/things-ai-could-easily-do-but-theyre-too-lazy-to-program-it/932861 "2021-02-13T22:24:46Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 19\ **Page:** 3
**Author:** ![blabbermeister](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/b/e9a140/32.png) [@blabbermeister](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/blabbermeister)\ **Post date:** [March 4, 2021, 12:37am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/things-ai-could-easily-do-but-theyre-too-lazy-to-program-it/932861/41 "2021-03-04T00:37:01Z")
Remember back in the 1980’s when you got your first VCR and you’d find that sometimes you’d record a program only to have the first or last minute cut off? Fast forward to 2021 and it’s a DVR now but it’s the same exact problem! I guess I… I’m sort of disappointed; I thought that with the digital it wouldn’t happen like this but, I guess I have to record 45 minutes for a 30-minute sitcom. Maybe the robots could have done something. Time doesn’t progress. ---
**Author:** ![JohnGalt](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/johngalt/32/184_2.png) [@JohnGalt](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/JohnGalt)\ **Post date:** [March 4, 2021, 1:56am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/things-ai-could-easily-do-but-theyre-too-lazy-to-program-it/932861/42 "2021-03-04T01:56:42Z")
This - your DVR should be able to be analyzing the program as it records it to see if it’s still continuing before cutting it off. (I recall a special VCR that claimed to be able to detect commercials and pause recording so you didn’t have to fast-forward through the commercials.) Then after a few days or weeks seeing that that show always runs a minute or two late, have it automatically record the extra time. Shouldn’t be that hard to implement. ---
**Author:** ![LSLGuy](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/lslguy/32/5813_2.png) [@LSLGuy](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/LSLGuy)\ **Post date:** [March 4, 2021, 2:46am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/things-ai-could-easily-do-but-theyre-too-lazy-to-program-it/932861/43 "2021-03-04T02:46:10Z")
You obviously don’t understnad who programs teh DVR and who delivers the product = the ads. Hint: they’re the same company and you are NOT their customer; the sponsors are. Their goal is to make it difficult to record programs and to make it very difficult to skip ads. Not impossible, or soon there’d be awkward legislation. But making it unreliable is to their interest. As to the weird timing of starting and ending … The various channels advertise via the on-screen guide feature that all shows begin and end on the exact half hour, at :00 and :30. That’s a bald lie. In reality each channel runs a different offset from perfect time. The goal is to make you lose the first or last part of a program every time you change channels, but to be safe recording all your programs _as long as you stick with just our one channel_. Again it’s all about delivering an obedient audience of sheeple to the actual cable customer: the advertisers. ---
**Author:** ![Cervaise](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/cervaise/32/16693_2.png) [@Cervaise](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Cervaise)\ **Post date:** [March 4, 2021, 11:14am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/things-ai-could-easily-do-but-theyre-too-lazy-to-program-it/932861/44 "2021-03-04T11:14:05Z")
As a response to the general concept that AI could be used to solve various annoyances, I will offer, for consideration, an AI application that is in use right now, with which most of you have direct experience: Facebook’s “report violation of community standards” feature. There are lots of assholes in the world. They get their jollies posting demeaning insults against people, grotesque and offensive pictures in inappropriate fora, and so on. To combat this, Facebook offers the reporting feature. If you report something, it’s supposed to be reviewed, and if it violates the applicable standard, it’s removed and there may be further consequences for the person who posted it. However, you know that in the real world it doesn’t actually work this way. Part of the problem for Facebook was that assigning dedicated staff to review offensive content turns out to be a terrible approach, because it’s utterly soul-scorching work. You spend your whole shift, day after day after day, looking at pictures of violence and gross pornography, sometimes involving children, and reading text containing racial slurs and threats of harm. The people who do this are legitimately affected by PTSD. More and more, Facebook is turning over this function to automated systems. On the surface, this is a positive development, because it means many fewer human beings are being forced to drink from the firehose of other people’s awfulness. In practice, though, we crash hard against the brick wall of how limited these systems really are. It turns out that what makes something offensive to people is highly contextual and subjective, and AI language processors are very bad at understanding it. Sometimes clearly offensive content is accepted by the system; sometimes innocuous content activates the filter for no apparent reason. Even image recognition software is buggy and inconsistent. Lots of images get flagged by Facebook (and Twitter and other services) as being potentially inappropriate, despite being clearly benign. A few months ago, for example, a Canadian agricultural retailer had its online advertising interrupted because it was using a picture of a bushel of onions, and the automated image interpreter thought it was a picture of naked breasts. So before you assume that these problems aren’t being addressed because nobody’s interested in solving them, just remember the last time you got an automated message from Facebook that your post was blocked and your account was suspended because your content violated community standards, and you have absolutely no idea what it was that could have been interpreted that way and you have no recourse for appealing or soliciting reconsideration. ---
**Author:** ![iamthewalrus\_3](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/i/258eb7/32.png) [@iamthewalrus\_3](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/iamthewalrus_3)\ **Post date:** [March 4, 2021, 3:07pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/things-ai-could-easily-do-but-theyre-too-lazy-to-program-it/932861/45 "2021-03-04T15:07:27Z")
Yeah, but Amazon used the standard human psychology bypass of making the thing that they _want_ you to click a big brightly colored thing that looks like a button and the thing they don’t want you to click a slightly colored line of text. This isn’t people being dumb in a vacuum, it is a system that is tricking them _by design_ into doing a dumb thing. ---
**Author:** ![Grrr](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/grrr/32/146_2.png) [@Grrr](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Grrr)\ **Post date:** [March 4, 2021, 3:38pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/things-ai-could-easily-do-but-theyre-too-lazy-to-program-it/932861/46 "2021-03-04T15:38:46Z")
How about when you lose your spot on Facebook bc you clicked a link? There should be an easy fix to that. I’d also like a central hub for all my streaming services. So all the shows I’m watching across all the services pops up in one place. (Playstation sort of does this but it’s littered with all sorts of non relevant content to the point it’s useless) ---
**Author:** ![Lumpy](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/lumpy/32/446_2.png) [@Lumpy](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Lumpy)\ **Post date:** [March 5, 2021, 4:05pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/things-ai-could-easily-do-but-theyre-too-lazy-to-program-it/932861/47 "2021-03-05T16:05:14Z")
> [@Cervaise](#): > > In practice, though, we crash hard against the brick wall of how limited these systems really are. It turns out that what makes something offensive to people is highly contextual and subjective, and AI language processors are very bad at understanding it. A classic example was anyone searching for “Superbowl XXX”. 😄 ---
**Author:** ![JohnGalt](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/johngalt/32/184_2.png) [@JohnGalt](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/JohnGalt)\ **Post date:** [March 6, 2021, 4:43am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/things-ai-could-easily-do-but-theyre-too-lazy-to-program-it/932861/48 "2021-03-06T04:43:19Z")
Just imagine that you do invent a DVR that can handle detecting program interruptions like ads and skips then, or extra recording time as needed. You might make some money selling your super A/I DVR, but the way to get really rich would be to sell your patent to the ad companies and the networks, so nobody ever gets to use your patent. (Unless they’re already buying up all such patents and technology; how can you know?) ---
**Author:** ![msmith537](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/m/d9b06d/32.png) [@msmith537](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/msmith537)\ **Post date:** [March 6, 2021, 4:41pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/things-ai-could-easily-do-but-theyre-too-lazy-to-program-it/932861/49 "2021-03-06T16:41:29Z")
> [@Toxylon](#): > > I’d say the Youtube mess is intentional, not the result of laziness. Making navigation difficult increases the time people spend on the site, all the while potentially going off on an tangent / down the rabbit hole, seeing way more advertising than they did if the site was efficiently searchable. I’ve been in the technology field long enough to realize that much of what is built is “by accident”, not “intentional”. ---
**Author:** ![blabbermeister](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/b/e9a140/32.png) [@blabbermeister](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/blabbermeister)\ **Post date:** [March 6, 2021, 4:57pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/things-ai-could-easily-do-but-theyre-too-lazy-to-program-it/932861/50 "2021-03-06T16:57:46Z")
> [@msmith537](#): > > I’ve been in the technology field long enough to realize that much of what is built is “by accident”, not “intentional”. I’m still wondering: When I search Amazon for “computer keyboard” (_with the quotes_) and I get results including pianos and batteries, if that’s (a) intentional; (b) unintentional but they intentionally didn’t fix it, or ( c ) completely unintentional. ---
**Author:** ![msmith537](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/m/d9b06d/32.png) [@msmith537](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/msmith537)\ **Post date:** [March 6, 2021, 9:24pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/things-ai-could-easily-do-but-theyre-too-lazy-to-program-it/932861/51 "2021-03-06T21:24:54Z")
It’s not like someone manually maps every product to every search criteria. They have data scientists build machine learning algorithms that try to make associations between search terms people enter and products they purchase. Sometimes they come up with non-intuitive answers. ---
**Author:** ![markn\_1](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/m/f9ae1b/32.png) [@markn\_1](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/markn_1)\ **Post date:** [March 7, 2021, 1:01am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/things-ai-could-easily-do-but-theyre-too-lazy-to-program-it/932861/52 "2021-03-07T01:01:06Z")
In the early 2000s I worked for ReplayTV, one of the first DVR manufacturers. We did have a feature to skip commercials. It worked by detecting one or black frames which, at that time at least, always preceded and followed a commercial break. Several TV companies sued ReplayTV over this feature. However the company went out of business before the suits were resolved. During this time, the CEO of Turner Broadcasting made the statement that in his view, watching a show without watching the commercials was “stealing the programming”. Although he did allow “a certain amount of tolerance for bathroom breaks”. I was glad to hear I did not have to start wearing diapers while watching TV. ---
**Author:** ![Horatius](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/horatius/32/3572_2.png) [@Horatius](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Horatius)\ **Post date:** [March 8, 2021, 2:13pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/things-ai-could-easily-do-but-theyre-too-lazy-to-program-it/932861/53 "2021-03-08T14:13:06Z")
> [@JohnGalt](#): > > Unless they’re already buying up all such patents and technology; how can you know? You could know by looking up the patents, and see who is the owner of record. Such things are public records. ---
**Author:** ![jnglmassiv](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/j/f07891/32.png) [@jnglmassiv](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/jnglmassiv)\ **Post date:** [March 8, 2021, 9:32pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/things-ai-could-easily-do-but-theyre-too-lazy-to-program-it/932861/54 "2021-03-08T21:32:40Z")
> [@Keeve](#): > > My pet peeve is when a lower-case R is followed by a lower-case N, and it looks like a lower-case M. Can you tell the difference? rn m Heh, I was trading messages with a friend while I happened to be making a sauce for chicken wings. One of the ingredients was pomegranate juice which I spelled out the first time but shortened to pom after. Delicious & tangy porn juice sauce. ---
**Author:** ![blabbermeister](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/b/e9a140/32.png) [@blabbermeister](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/blabbermeister)\ **Post date:** [March 9, 2021, 2:51am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/things-ai-could-easily-do-but-theyre-too-lazy-to-program-it/932861/55 "2021-03-09T02:51:08Z")
Haha! Not x-rated but similar: At my summer camp in the 80’s someone followed a cookie recipe that called for 21 cups of sugar. It should have been “4” but when handwritten in a particular way the number 4 can look like 21. They were still edible, but a bit bland. ---
**Author:** ![Colibri](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/colibri/32/1841_2.png) [@Colibri](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Colibri)\ **Post date:** [March 9, 2021, 3:42am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/things-ai-could-easily-do-but-theyre-too-lazy-to-program-it/932861/56 "2021-03-09T03:42:02Z")
> [@blabbermeister](#): > > They were still edible, but a bit bland. I would have thought they would be like candy. ---
**Author:** ![Jophiel](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/jophiel/32/66_2.png) [@Jophiel](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Jophiel)\ **Post date:** [March 9, 2021, 12:43pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/things-ai-could-easily-do-but-theyre-too-lazy-to-program-it/932861/57 "2021-03-09T12:43:52Z")
Last week, Spotify’s weekly recommendation list contained four songs I previously disliked. It didn’t attempt to play them, it just had them on the list greyed out with the “dislike” symbol next to them. Spotify, you had one job: pick thirty songs I might plausibly enjoy this week. Picking songs you know I actively disliked is no way to do it. “Don’t include songs with a dislike flag” doesn’t seem like super advanced AI. ---
**Author:** ![Machine\_Elf](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/m/82dd89/32.png) [@Machine\_Elf](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Machine_Elf)\ **Post date:** [March 9, 2021, 12:57pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/things-ai-could-easily-do-but-theyre-too-lazy-to-program-it/932861/58 "2021-03-09T12:57:13Z")
> [@Horatius](#): > > You could know by looking up the patents, and see who is the owner of record. Such things are public records. This. And regardless of whether you patented the tech (and sold the patent) or just became aware of the existence of someone else’s patent, you can mark your calendar for the expiration date of said patent, and have a product ready to sell the day after that. ---
**Author:** ![shh1313](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/shh1313/32/8020_2.png) [@shh1313](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/shh1313)\ **Post date:** [March 9, 2021, 1:18pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/things-ai-could-easily-do-but-theyre-too-lazy-to-program-it/932861/59 "2021-03-09T13:18:39Z")
Until auto correct achieves 100 percent perfection, AI would ignore ‘grammar natzi’s.’ Most of the time it is 99% snark and trolling because they reject your reply or don’t like you. The rest of the time they are narcissistic bullies seeking attention. If someone truly wanted to point out an error it can be done by nicely mentioning the mistake providing that the word or punctuation error warrants that level of attention. If it does present the mistake in a manner so that it becomes a learning experience. People forget that immigrants learning a new language, dyslexic people, ageing population, people who were unable to procure higher learning read The Straight Dope. Many people read this and other boards looking for information and entertainment. Many never contribute because of the snark and bullying. They know they will become the object of ridicule from long time posters who skirt the edges of the rules of posting from the mods. [Previous page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/things-ai-could-easily-do-but-theyre-too-lazy-to-program-it/932861.md?page=2)