In a partially hilarious, partially disturbing article this week in The Wall Street Journal, “Facebook Has No Sense of Humor,” the Editor in Chief of the satirical website The Babylon Bee related that two patently ridiculous “news” stories had recently been fact-checked by Snopes: The Onion’s “Shelling From Royal Caribbean’s M.S. ‘Allure’ Sinks Carnival Cruise Vessel That Crossed Into Disputed Waters” and the Babylon Bee’s “Ocasio-Cortez Appears on ‘The Price Is Right,’ Guesses Everything Is Free.”
They made me laugh, but then came the more troubling part. The Babylon Bee story headlined “Senator Hirono Demands ACB Be Weighed Against a Duck to See If She Is a Witch” was blocked by the robots at Facebook because the Monty-Python referenced line “we must burn her” appeared in the body of the article.
The real problem for me came after the Bee alerted Facebook to the supposed mistake made by its robots, which had generated a warning that the “incitement to violence” could bring further repercussions if repeated. The Bee appealed to Facebook, but to no avail.
We are the first to argue that robots aren’t really that smart – rather they are amoral and very quick at doing mindless drudgery – as we’ve argued in Artificial Intelligence: Good and Evil All at Once, Just Like its Creators.[i]
This blog doesn’t really give a toss about Facebook. It’s a useful investigatory tool as far as it goes, but if Facebook were to disappear tomorrow, no tears would be shed around here. That its robots weren’t overruled by people with good sense is the better reason not to trust Facebook’s human judges of propriety or morality.
So why should a good investigator have a sense of humor? The same reason, broadly that an investigator needs empathy, just as we said on our companion blog recently. Empathy lets you make better guesses about what someone may do next or may have done previously. Humor is useful because the people we look at also have senses of humor. It’s useful the way empathy is, for filtering purposes as above, and also because humor is a great way to put people you are interviewing at ease. Not always, but when warranted.
If you act like a machine, your results will be as good as a machine’s, but you will get them a lot more slowly than a machine would have.
Where is the value (and fun) in that?
[i] In a full law review article, I argue that artificial intelligence brings a lot of promising tools to investigators, but not because it can investigate for us. Rather, AI can comb through the mountains of new data being created hourly. Before long, we will be able to search transcripts of podcasts and YouTube videos, for example. [Legal Jobs in the Age of Artificial Intelligence: Moving from Today’s Limited Universe of Data Toward the Great Beyond. Savannah Law Review, Vol. 5, No.1 (2017).]