Our Online Behaviour During The Pandemic Has Confused AI Algorithms

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As we all know that currently, the world is facing a situation that never happened in recent times, and due to this there is fear and uncertainty everywhere. The coronavirus has also effected the online behavior of people as the machine learning algorithms developed to predict the behavior are struggling.

Taking an example of the e-commerce behemoth Amazon, the algorithms that recommend products on their website are struggling to interpret our new lifestyles as reported by MIT Technology Review.

Though ML tools are developed in a way to take in new data, they’re they can not adapt as dramatically as needed especially in this lockdown situation the change is too fast.

A recent example of this is a company whose work is to detect credit card fraud had to step in and tweak its algorithm to account for a surge of interest in gardening equipment and power tools.

A few more examples were like an online retailer found that its Ai system was ordering stock that no longer matched with what was selling and a company that uses AI to recommend investments based on sentiment analysis of news stories was confused by the generally negative tone throughout the media.

“The situation is so volatile,” Rael Cline, CEO of the algorithmic marketing consulting firm Nozzle, told MIT Tech.

“You’re trying to optimize for toilet paper last week, and this week everyone wants to buy puzzles or gym equipment.”

Experts suggest that this is a good time to improve the algorithms even more.

While some companies are dedicating more time and resources working on their algorithms and doing some manual tweaks, some others are considering this as an opportunity to improve.

Our weird behavior during the pandemic is messing with AI models
In the week of April 12-18, the top 10 search terms on Amazon.com were: toilet paper, face mask, hand sanitizer, paper towels, Lysol spray, Clorox wipes, mask, Lysol, masks for germ protection, and N95 mask. People weren’t just searching, they were buying too-and in bulk. The majority of people looking for masks ended up buying…

Sai Teja

Sai Teja is a second-year computer science undergraduate at the University of Hyderabad. With expertise in many modern technologies like Machine Learning, he is also a blogger and has interests in digital marketing and SEO also. He has a dream to build a single internet destination for science and technology enthusiasts