The premise of this article is how our brain is similar to a machine, and the biases and errors the machine experiences are experienced by the brain too, and in some cases this may be leveraged to drive success at a marketing or electoral campaign.
1. The good orator - No election has ever been won without a good orator at the helm. However good your policies are at the end of the day it needs to be sold. A good orator is like quality data to a machine. To drive learning in a machine, if we even want to propagate biases in some way, it needs to be clearly and strategically delivered. This delivery of data, to steer the mind and machine in a certain way, have also been called Propaganda in warfare.
2. The 360 degree delivery – To drive a target candidate to take a certain action, stimulus must be provided from every direction. It is widely accepted the same objective can be achieved with much less effort with stimulus from multiple dimension, rather than larger one-dimensional effort. It is the same reason we come across our favorite brand across multiple platforms like TV, radio, newspaper, social media, online ads etc. According to a successful marketing platform ‘personalized messaging across email, SMS, direct mail, and more, alongside personalized online response’ leads to a much successful marketing campaign. AI systems inspired by this characteristic of the brain is always advised to be built around with data from as many diverse source systems as possible.
3. What is in it for me - Human beings by the very nature of their existence and survival instinct mostly react to news and events that directly affect their well-being. The same idea is implemented in reinforcement learning where the agent takes measure to fulfill objective which in our case is survival. So to make your target audience to take notice of any policy or idea, it should be narrated as tightly coupled with the audiences’ well-being. It should answer their basic question how it will affect me.
4. Relative rather than absolute – Human brains intuitively understand something relative much better than anything absolute. If you ask most people if a deal is good, they will generally say it is good or bad based on how other people are getting deals. In the same way you can manipulate a machine to label something on a particular high or low range, by strategically infusing data on the other end of the scale. In the same way during a political or marketing campaign it is not enough to advertise your positives but also important to emphasize your opponents weaknesses.
5. Confirmation bias – Definition - “Confirmation bias occurs from the direct influence of desire on beliefs. When people would like a certain idea or concept to be true, they end up believing it to be true. They are motivated by wishful thinking. This error leads the individual to stop gathering information when the evidence gathered so far confirms the views or prejudices one would like to be true.” This is a psychological error that can always be used to one’s advantage during a political or marketing campaign. Political and Corporate organizations have at various times taken advantages of this by implementing a biased belief system at an early age of life or consumption cycle.
6. ML bias – Machine Learning applications develop inherent biases when fed data which may be tilted towards a certain stereotypical trend due to the flawed nature in which society develops. Like real-world example of a machine learning model that’s designed to differentiate between men and women in pictures. When the training data contains more pictures of women in kitchens than men in kitchens, or more pictures of men writing computer code than women writing computer code, then algorithm is trained to make incorrect inferences about the gender of people engaged in those activities. Human brain can be manipulated in the same way too. If you give enough example to a brain, associating people of certain characteristic to certain nature of actions – either good or bad, human brains inherently start associating these people to those activities without extensive thought.
But however amazing our brain is, it still have certain flaws which have been inherited by ML and AI processes as these are inspired by the brain itself. But I guess all these imperfections are what keeps us human.