AI can’t classify a cat

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Informant Data:

Jiuqi Chen was born in Beijing, China, on November 19th, 1999. She went to the U.S. to study at Dartmouth College. She had a strong interest in Mathematics and computer science. During her time at Dartmouth, she took several computer science courses, including CS 74, from which she learned basic concepts and models in the area of machine learning and statistical analysis.

Contextual Data:

Cultural Context: The meme of women and cat is a classic form of a meme, where the left-hand side woman is yelling at the cat on the right, and the cat appears to be not bothered at all by the woman. In many science fiction such as Matrix, artificial intelligence (AI) is imagined to be omnipotent, often with malicious intent towards humans. Neural networks are a set of algorithms that are widely used in contemporary machine learning, modeled loosely after the human brain, aiming at recognizing patterns.
Social Context: Neural network is a very commonly used model when developing AI and classification problem is probably the most fundamental problem in the application of machine learning. This meme is poking fun at the reality that sometimes even a very well-developed machine learning model can’t do something as basic as identifying a cat with 100% accuracy, teasing the unrealistic worries from people who don’t know about the current state of AI development.

Item:

Collector’s Name: Jiuqi Chen

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Dartmouth Folklore Archive