That's where things get really interesting and all the fun questions start to pop up. Even if human influence of the system was minimal and occurred back in the system's infancy, just how impactful is that influence today? What were those inputs? If we don't understand what's going on under the hood, can we really trust that the system is still doing a good job, or is it possible that its current success is perceived based on reputation gained from past successes? And at what point does such a system transition from identifying patterns to pattern creation?

Is it possible for a neural network to lose its mind somewhere along the way? Google Flu worked fantastically, right up until it didn't, and nobody understood what went wrong.

Then the moral questions -- should our values impact how these things work? And, if so, to what degree? This article essentially implies that the system has re-discovered phrenology, which we decided long ago was a flawed theory that was unpalatable in no small part due to its roots in racism. If AI comes up with the same theory, does that make it an acceptable theory? We're still very early in our exploration of our relationship with such systems, and there's potential danger in how we interact with them, with respect to both how we reach them and how we learn from them.

Really, though, my issue right now is with how some people are interpreting this information. "Oh great, they're advertising to pedos and racists" is certainly not the right takeaway here, yet that exact sentiment seems to be what some people are taking away, based on some of the comments that popped up in here last night. I don't believe that "the system has been training for a long time, so we should trust it" is an especially useful conclusion either.