Too Clever By Half

In theory at least, AI systems should get better and better at statistical guesswork.

Yet the AI behind Evernote has suddenly become less good at deciding where to automatically file any given article that I might feed it.

Yesterday I noted how it now wants to dump pretty much anything in the Sunday Times into ‘Technology’ even if the piece is about Homer and the Trojan War.

This left me wondering if it is reading the finished text or the underlying HTML and meta-tags.

Then this morning I observed how a review of a book about extraterrestrial languages in The Spectator would have been shoved into ‘Film & TV’.

I can see how that might have happened. Perhaps this is an AI that has learned to make cunning inferences.