Heather Dawe, MSc. is a renowned data and AI thought leader with over 25 years of experience in the field. Heather has innovated with data and AI throughout her career, highlights include developing the first data science team in the UK public sector and leading on the development of early machine learning and AI assurance processes for the National Health Service (NHS) in England. Heather currently works with large UK Enterprises, innovating with data and technology to improve services in the health, local government, retail, manufacturing, and finance sectors. A STEM Ambassador and multidisciplinary data science pioneer, Heather also enjoys mountain running, rock climbing, painting, and writing. She served as a jury member for the 2021 Banff Mountain Book Competition and guest edited the 2022 edition of The Himalayan Journal. Heather is the author of several books inspired by mountains and has written for national and international print publications including The Guardian and Alpinist.
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Social media and attention engineering
There is no better everyday example of how AI and machine learning are tied together. In a tweet in May 2022, Tesla CEO and now Twitter owner Elon Musk pointed toward these concerns with the Twitter feed algorithm.
Figure 2.2: Elon Musk’s take on Twitter’s algorithm
Using social media data to manipulate voting trends and public opinion came into the spotlight with the infamous Cambridge Analytica scandal during the 2016 US presidential elections. Cambridge Analytica harvested Facebook data to change audience behavior for political and commercial causes. The use of bots, natural language, and visual image generation kept growing with the advent of technologies such as OpenAI’s GPT3 and Deepfakes. It is getting harder to distinguish between bots and real individuals as advanced technologies enable fake and AI-generated images and text. Deepfaking is a technique to generate human images that can...