That's How It Happened

The recent reports that (a) a new neural net "knows" which movies will be successful and (b) a new emotion recognition algorithm "knows" that Mona Lisa was mostly happy, seem to me to be utterly wishful thinking. The media are reporting these clever bits of software as if they are somehow better at doing what they do than a human would be. The movie rating neural net reminded me of ScriptGenerator©®™. That book purports to be the manual for a neural net that writes, produces and markets Hollywood blockbusters. There is a disparity between most "best of" movie lists, and the actual Top 100 Grossers, but it's a fiction to imagine a computer could be better at predicting blockbusters than say, Roger Ebert. Equally, reading emotion from faces is something we all do well from birth. Face recognition is not an example of "the wisdom of crowds", it's something we are hard-wired to do flawlessly. If the Mona Lisa is enigmatic, that's because her smile really is ambiguous. No matter how big a neural net is devised to analyse her face, the neural net inside my skull can do the job better. Don't believe me? Try uploading your photo to myheritage.com to see which celebrity you (supposedly) most look like.