AI and Robots Are a Minefield of Cognitive Biases

I remember Microsoft introducing an early AI in a game and they made it a young boy. This seemed like an artful/deceptive attempt to take advantage of human biases to make it seem more inpressive than it was.

Which is fine, up to a point, for showbiz, but probably not ideal for wider applications.

I'm not sure if this technique has a name but I see it more and more like " has more than ". They're not lying but they are taking advantage of human biases to very specifically talk about a minor truth to distract you from the overall truth.

"Rinsing your recycling (in water heated by electricity generated by coal) generates more carbon than the recycling saves". Again true, but carefully crafted to make you think the opposite of the truth.

Notably, no evil, mustache-twirling villain is required for this. The people who make boring, reasonable assertions will be automatically filtered out in favour of the people making wild and sloppy claims that appeal to people's biases and when they get caught out they'll be replaced by another similar person.

But a few villains will intentionally take advantage of it too.

Journalism tends to reward this. I used to work in a much more public-facing field where we would regularly get calls from local journalists about projects we were involved in.

The journalists never printed the quotes from the engineers who gave thoughtful, measured, and accurate answers. They always quoted the blowhards and the charlatans in our office who'd inevitably toss together a bunch of meaningless buzzwords, make a series of vague statements that sounded insightful, and play fast and loose with the facts. A journalist's job is to sell newspapers, or clicks, not to keep anyone informed.

edit: I removed a "not" to clear up the ambiguous double-negative. Summary, my position is that science says recycling is a good thing. Numerous media stories will focus relentlessly on any small flaw in it, either to get a reaction from the people who do it and think it's a good thing, or support the people who fight against it for political reasons as it represents (like global warming) a massive failure of free markets.