After France’s soccer world cup victory, millions went in the street to celebrate. Many people came from the suburbs, often proudly wearing French flags to party on the streets. Later in the evening, a fraction of this celebration turned violent. At least 3 stores were looted, 24 cars destroyed, and…

Defamation is efficient, and AIs may have already figured it out — During a long bus ride across France, my neighbor was watching YouTube for hours, watching the auto-play recommendations at the end of the video. Since I worked on the algorithm that computes these recommendations, I was curious what they were about. In one of these videos, the topic was the…

Diffamer les concurrents est une stratégie efficace pour gagner de l’audience. Les Intelligences Artificielles de YouTube et Facebook s’en sont rendu compte. — Lors d’un interminable trajet en car, mon voisin passe son temps sur YouTube. Comme j’ai travaillé sur l’algorithme qui fait les recommandations, une certaine fierté m’incite à regarder de plus près. Dans ces vidéos, il est question d’un projet visant à exterminer deux milliards de personnes. Je blague: “Alors qui…

YouTube’s recommendation A.I. is designed to maximize the time users spend online. Fiction often outperforms reality. — We all heard about conspiracy theories, alternative facts and fake news circulating on the internet. How do they become so popular? What’s the impact of the state-of-the-art algorithms on their success? …

More than one fourth of videos recommended on election eve have since been removed. Why? — On the eve of the US presidential election, we used this recommendation explorer to extract a sample of 800 unique videos recommended by YouTube in response to searches about a presidential candidates. More than 200 of these videos have since been removed, some of them by YouTube, and others by…

YouTube’s Artificial Intelligence (A.I.) recommends tens of billions of videos every single day, yielding billions of views. On the eve of the US Presidential Election, we gathered recommendation data on the two main candidates, and found that more than 80% of recommended videos were favorable to Trump, whether the initial…