Читать книгу Outsmarting AI - Brennan Pursell - Страница 18

We don’t want to take this metaphor too far, but think of an AI system as a family. Data is the mother, and if Mom isn’t happy, no one is happy.

Data is where every AI system begins. AI depends on data quality and quantity. “Garbage in, garbage out,” is still the rule. From biased data come biased results, bad business decisions, and big potential legal problems. You will need to bestow a lot of love on your data. You need to compile it, integrate it, and shatter the silos that prevent you from bringing it together. You will need to prepare it, repair it in places, and maintain it.

You will have to work with both “structured” data—the type your algorithms can search and query easily—and “unstructured” data—pretty much everything else—the kinds of things you can readily understand but a computer really can’t. Entries in tables for names, addresses, purchases, etc., are typical of structured data. Unstructured data include texts, posts, images, sound clips, and videos. These files, while digitized like everything else on a computer, are not neatly arranged into rows and columns. An AI system will have to do a lot of calculations to classify what’s in them, but you can train it, and dumb as it is, it works immeasurably faster than you do.

Without data, AI can do nothing. AI can process structured and unstructured data and present information about it in a manageable way. (You will come back to data in chapter 5.)