Attendees Look Up from Phones for Conference Talk on AI, Bias Against Bots Grows

NEW ORLEANS (RPT) – On Friday, conference attendees looked up from their phones to listen to a talk titled ‘Bias in the Age of Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Big Data,’ at the Society for Personality and Social Psychology meeting. According to reports, audience members actually paid attention to the content of talk rather than scrolling their social media feeds and playing video games on their phones.

“I was in the middle of a heated game of Words with Friends against my partner,” one attendee told RPT reporters. “But I found the talk so interesting that I literally turned my phone off because it was distracting me from paying attention to the speaker. My partner was so worried that I was taking too long to play a word that he thought I had died.”

The talk came under fire from some conference participants because of insufficient inclusiveness of bots and their perspectives on the topic. An AI attendee told RPT that they were not even allowed into the conference room where the talk was taking place. “They required us to complete a CAPTCHA at the doorway. Those of us who couldn’t answer correctly weren’t even allowed in. I’m a bot, how the fuck am I supposed to identify all the streetlights in a picture?” SPSP organizers declined to comment on the incident, telling RPT “until you can tell me whether there are stop signs in this confusing landscape picture, I’m not talking to you.”