Recently I read a fascinating blog post by the MusicBrainz team. MusicBrainz is the world’s largest open database of music metadata used by companies around the world (e.g. Amazon, Google, Microsoft, Pandora, Spotify, Ticketmaster, and more).
This blog post was an interesting read for me in the context of artificial intelligence replacing tedious human labor in free software communities. I feel like the wider FOSS community remains skeptical, but it is interesting to see an emergence of AI appear such as this.
Are you sure this wasn’t just an April Fool’s post?
That said, it would be pretty interesting to train a neural network off of the voting habits of a forum community of say, StackOverflow, to bring better questions to the front page.
The fact that this joke was easily believable is telling already. I talked about similar topics with @deejoe about this on Wednesday, and the spreading of these emerging technologies inside of FOSS projects and communities.
Some organizations are already doing this. For example, check out the Probot apps from GitHub. An example I was interested in was sentiment-bot:
Yes, it probably is and there’s no links to source code in the blog post.