Full Width [alt+shift+f] Shortcuts [alt+shift+k]
Sign Up [alt+shift+s] Log In [alt+shift+l]
Articles [alt+h] Reading List [alt+r] [alt+s]
Back to articles
27

The bait and switch behind AI risk prediction tools

from AI Snake Oil [alt+shift+b] in AI

Toronto recently used an AI tool to predict when a public beach will be safe. It went horribly awry. The developer claimed the tool achieved over 90% accuracy in predicting when beaches would be safe to swim in. But the tool did much worse: on a majority of the days when the water was in fact unsafe, beaches remained open based on the tool’s assessments. It was less accurate than the previous method of simply testing the water for bacteria each day.
over a year ago
Remove from reading list Add to reading list [alt+a] Read now [→]

Improve your reading experience

Logged in users get linked directly to articles resulting in a better reading experience. Please login for free, it takes less than 1 minute.

Login now

More from AI Snake Oil

Is AI progress slowing down?

Making sense of recent technology trends and claims

3 months ago • 67 votes
We Looked at 78 Election Deepfakes. Political Misinformation is not an AI Problem.

Technology Isn’t the Problem—or the Solution.

3 months ago • 68 votes
Does the UK’s liver transplant matching algorithm systematically exclude younger patients?

Seemingly minor technical decisions can have life-or-death effects

4 months ago • 57 votes
FAQ about the book and our writing process

What's in the book and how we wrote it

6 months ago • 82 votes
Can AI automate computational reproducibility?

A new benchmark to measure the impact of AI on improving science

6 months ago • 101 votes

More in AI

Making Quantum Flytrap a polyglot with AI vibe translating

Making quantum physics more accessible, thanks to with the power of Claude, DeepSeek, Cursor, and i18n. Virtual Lab now speaks Spanish, Portuguese, Chinese, Polish, Ukrainian, French, and German.

15 hours ago • 3 votes
More Fun With GPT-4o Image Generation

Greetings from Costa Rica!

13 hours ago • 2 votes
Questions about President Trump from a former psychology professor

Is he well?

an hour ago • 1 votes
AI #110: Of Course You Know...

Yeah.

2 hours ago • 1 votes
AI has (sort of) passed the Turing Test; here’s why that hardly matters

Don’t panic

yesterday • 2 votes

The best way to read the internet.
Made for nerds, by a nerd.

The best way to read the internet

© 2023 Bored Reading. All rights reserved.

Terms Privacy Design by Kumail

bored reading

v. 229.328 compliant with
earth/mars-x8292 communication
protocol 29xjw899992

When Google killed Google Reader, the bloggosphere took a severe hit and the content quality went down because there weren't enough readers to justify the effort it takes to maintain a high quality blog.

What's left is a decaying wasteland of blogs, most abandoned, a lot are now SEO spam, and 99% are not worth reading. BoredReading is a way to read the remaining great blogs that survived the ice age.

To add your favorite blog, please suggest it here! I get emails every day which helps me maintain a high quality selection of blogs!

Avatar

Made by,
Kumail Hunaid

@kumailht on Twitter.
My website and email.

Close [esc]