Some advice for journalists writing about artificial intelligence

togelius:

Keep in mind: AI is a big field, and very diverse in terms of topics and methods used. (True, it’s not as diverse as it should be in some other senses.) The main AI conferences (such as IJCAI, AAAI, ICML and NIPS) have thousands of attendees, and most of them only understand a small part of what goes on in the conference. When I go to one of these conferences, I can perhaps follow maybe 20% of the talks and get something out of them. While I might be a bit dim myself, it’s rare to find anyone who can keep up to date with sub-fields as diverse as constraint propagation, deep learning and stochastic search.

Recommendation: Do not assume that researchers you talk to knows “what’s going on right now in AI”. Even more importantly, if someone says they know what’s going on right now in AI, assume that they only know a small part of the big picture. Double-check with someone working in another field of AI.