Been thinking about a quote lately. The quote is from the final episode of the first season of Shell Game, which is a great podcast.

As far back as 2013, a team of engineers at YouTube hit upon a phenomenon it called “the inversion”: the point at which the fake content we encounter on the internet outstrips the real. The engineers were developing algorithms to distinguish between authentic human views and manufactured web traffic — bought-and-paid-for views from bots or “click farms.” Like the discriminator in a GAN, the team’s algorithms studied the traffic data and tried to understand the difference between normal visitors and bogus ones.

Blake Livingston, an engineer who led the team at the time, told me the algorithm was working from a key assumption: “that the majority of traffic was normal.” But sometime in 2013, the YouTube engineers realized bot traffic was growing so rapidly that it could soon surpass the human views. When it did, the team’s algorithm might flip and start identifying the bot traffic as real and the human traffic as fake.

Part of why it is in my mind is because it's something to worry about, but it's also an epic nerd snipe for the algorithm designer part of my brain. You need a new breed of algorithm. Not quite classifier, not quite outlier detector and not quite clusterer. Something new.