The Mountain View giant has explained on a new post on the official Gmail blog about their new technology to detect and identify unwanted emails.
The latest news about artificial intelligence diverge in two types. The first one, and most alarming, claims that AI will be the end of us after a SkyNet equivalent straight up decides mankind can be dealt with (If you don’t believe these people exist, just as Elon Musk and his 37 projects to prevent it), and a second, more modest but also realistic one which has Google as its main example and pioneer, who have now introduced an automatic learning technology for their e-mail service which, they assure, can deal with 99.9% of all spam mail.
Last Thursday, the Gmail team made a post on their official blog where Sri Harsha Somanchi (Google’s PM), explained that filter now uses “an artificial neural network to detect and block the especially sneaky spam—the kind that could actually pass for wanted mail. […] With advances in machine learning, the spam filter can now reflect these individual preferences.”
The Google team had a hard time putting into word how this network operates, exactly. Yet, the numbers speak by themselves, and according to their data, only a 0,1% of spam could bypass this filter, which would be an unprecedented success. On the other hand, they also revealed that only 0,5% of all wanted mail is wrongly labeled as spam. Yet, if we compare these numbers to what they themselves reported in 2012 (when they claimed only 1% of all inbox mail was unwanted), it seems a huge investment for not a lot of progress in absolute terms.
Despite all of this, Google isn’t the only corporation trying to move forward with advanced filters using artificial intelligence. Facebook themselves have been attempting similar measures since 2013 to improve and reframe their news service, while Twitter also are working on filtering unwanted messages and tweets.
So now you know, if you suddenly get a surge of blue pill offers, or opportunities to earn millions of dollars in a few seconds, it means the AI has gone rogue, and the robot apocalypse is just around the corner.
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