Facebook, YouTube, Twitter and others can no longer hide their problems in a black box

tech.hindustantimes.com:

There's a perfectly good reason to break open the secrets of social-media giants. Over the past decade, governments have watched helplessly as their democratic processes were disrupted by misinformation and hate speech on sites like Meta Platforms Inc.'s Facebook, Alphabet Inc.'s YouTube and Twitter Inc. Now some governments are gearing up for a comeuppance.

In the next two years, Europe and the UK are preparing laws that will rein in the troublesome content that social-media firms have allowed to go viral. There has been much skepticism over their ability to look under the hood of companies like Facebook. Regulators, after all, lack the technical expertise, manpower and salaries that Big Tech boasts. And there's another technical snag: The artificial-intelligence systems tech firms use are notoriously difficult to decipher.

But naysayers should keep an open mind. New techniques are developing that will make probing those systems easier. AI's so-called black-box problem isn't as impenetrable as many think.

AI powers most of the action we see on Facebook or YouTube and, in particular, the recommendation systems that line up which posts go into your newsfeed, or what videos you should watch next — all to keep you scrolling. Millions of pieces of data are used to train AI software, allowing it to make predictions loosely similar to humans'. The hard part, for engineers, is understanding how AI makes a decision in the first place. Hence the black-box concept.

Consider the following two pictures:

You can probably tell within a few milliseconds which animal is the fox and which is the dog. But can you explain how you know? Most people would find it hard to articulate what it is about the nose, ears or shape of the head