
Human Rights Implications of IBM Watson’s ‘Personality Insights’ Tool - benbreen
https://medium.com/taraaz/https-medium-com-taraaz-human-rights-implications-of-ibm-watsons-personality-insights-942413e81117
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mcguire
" _Also, note that these results — both original and modified text from my
blogs — are very different from the results based on my Twitter feed (which
are shown at the beginning of this post)._ "

Congratulations! These are the results telling you your system is a failure.

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bencollier49
I don't think the Watson Personality Insights tool is _his_ system..

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cirgue
This reads like marketing material shoehorned into a soft-peddled criticism
about human rights in order to generate buzz. What stretched my suspension of
disbelief more than anything is that the author seems to think that people use
this product in production, which AFAICT, no one really does.

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royapakzad
That was not my intention; I added a disclaimer showing that I’m not
affiliated. I raised some real human rights concerns; IBM or any third party
companies using the tool should take them seriously. The issue is that
companies do use these tools, mostly in HR departments; recruiters can attest.
Another interesting paper on hiring and algorithmic decision making that you
might be interested:
[https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3408010](https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3408010)

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lowdose
Good writing! Have you seen this video of Michal Kosinski about the end of
privacy? He talks about making inferences about intimate psycho-demographic
information from photos.

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VUwBcTgzbtU&t=2468s](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VUwBcTgzbtU&t=2468s)

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ChuckMcM
Ah Personality Insights. In playing with it when it came out I noticed that
when it printed out something that someone agreed with they thought it rocked,
and when someone felt it characterized them incorrectly it was junk. This and
"Sentiment Analysis" get too much hype and not enough close inspection.

One of the more interesting discussions around this was that actual
personality tests have pretty carefully crafted questions that they then look
at the response to in a measurable way. But you can't really crawl a forum and
reliably match up "stimulus" and "response" so the results have so much noise
in them as to be unreliable.

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keepersdiary
I tried plugging the Keeper's Diary from Resident Evil:

    
    
      At night, we played poker with Scott the guard, Alias and Steve the researcher.
    
      Steve was very lucky, but I think he was cheating. What a scumbag.
    
      Today, a high ranking researcher asked me to take care of a new monster. It looks like a gorilla without any skin. They told me to feed them live food. When I threw in a pig, they were playing with it... tearing off the pig's legs and pulling out the guts before they actually ate it.
    
      Around 5 o'clock this morning, Scott came in and woke me up suddenly. He was wearing a protective suit that looks like a space suit. He told me to put one on as well. I heard there was an accident in the basement lab. It's no wonder, those researchers never rest, even at night.
    
      I've been wearing this annoying space suit since yesterday, my skin grows musty and feels very itchy. By way of revenge, I didn't feed those dogs today. Now I feel better.
    
      I went to the medical room because my back is all swollen and feels itchy. They put a big bandage on my back and the doctor told me I did not need to wear the space suit any more. I guess I can sleep well tonight.
    
      When I woke up this morning, I found another blister on my foot. It was annoying and I ended up dragging my foot as I went to the dog's pen. They have been quiet since morning, which is very unusual. I found that some of them had escaped. I'll be in real trouble if the higher-ups find out.
    
      Even though I didn't feel well, I decided to go see Nancy. It's my first day off in a long time but I was stopped by the guard on the way out. They say the company has ordered that no one leave the grounds. I can't even make a phone call. What kind of joke is this?!
    
      I heard a researcher who tried to escape from this mansion was shot last night. My entire body feels burning and itchy at night. When I was scratching the swelling on my arms, a lump of rotten flesh dropped off. What the hell is happening to me?
    
      Fever gone but itchy. Hungry and eat doggy food. Itchy itchy Scott came. Ugly face so killed him. Tasty.
    
      Itchy.
    
      Tasty.
    

Watson told me:

"You are skeptical, somewhat inconsiderate and can be perceived as
compulsive."

"You are reserved: you are a private person and don't let many people in. You
are hedonistic: you feel your desires strongly and are easily tempted by them.
And you are independent: you have a strong desire to have time to yourself."

"You are motivated to seek out experiences that provide a strong feeling of
organization."

"You are relatively unconcerned with both achieving success and independence.
You make decisions with little regard for how they show off your talents. And
you welcome when others direct your activities for you."

Interesting, to say the least...

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sgt101
keepersdiary: this is great :) It gives me a way to build a dataset (the
sayings of great characters in literature) that can be used to persuade the
lunatic fringe of my HR department to not contemplate this nonsense!

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thenightcrawler
Good thing watson doesn't work very well, or else this would be a big problem

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xkcd-sucks
The risk here is your congressman / boss / etc who doesn't even write their
own emails becomes convinced that it's meaningful

