Professional football has been mired in a spat over taunting calls, rightly or wrongly. which anyway … [+]
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Some insist that taunting is entirely in the eye of the beholder.
Ironically, of sorts, I suppose you might angrily claim that making that rather brazen statement is perhaps itself a taunting formulation.
I say this because there are those highly vocal advocates that insist the taunting act is altogether clear-cut and readily exposed. There is no need and no basis to muddy the waters by trying to make taunting seem to be intangible or mushy in terms of being ambiguously in the eye of a beholder.
Here’s what those staunch taunting determinists urge you do. Take a quick glance at any readily available standard dictionary and you’ll plainly see that taunting is unmistakably defined as a circumstance whereby you opt to reproach or challenge someone else, doing so in a mocking, insulting, scornful, or sarcastic way.
Case closed.
The problem of course is whether the person accused of taunting did so genuinely with the heartfelt desire to mock, insult, scorn, or be rudely sarcastic. It is possible that the person was unfairly labeled as taunting. The words they said or the gestures they made might be entirely innocent and innocuous. If the person on the receiving end took it differently, well, that seems unfortunate when the act was not of a taunting earnestly derived creation.
Hogwash comes the retort to this escapist posturing. A taunt is a taunt. The taunting person is responsible for their taunt, regardless of what was in their mind or heart. By employing a taunt, you are playing with fire. The other person is getting burned and you are to pay the price by being called out for the taunting actions. You cannot taunt and get away with it scot-free.
And this brings us to the heady topic of football.
How did we make the leap into the game of football?
Simply stated, the overbearing and distasteful shadow of taunting has ostensibly plagued professional football lately. Headlines on the sports page of any news organization vividly tell you that taunting is a huge point of contention. The insider wisecrack is that the NFL ought to be known as the “No Fun League” due to the widespread crackdown on taunting by football players and at times their coaches too.
This football season there were a lot of referees throwing their flags in response to what was purportedly assessed as taunting infractions. Let’s recount a recent taunting example that might still be under your skin and might have you broiling.
If you perchance watched the Rams versus 49ers game on Sunday, January 30, 2022, you probably already know what I am about to say. Keep in mind that this was an extremely important game that would determine the NFC Championship. Ultimately, it led to the Rams heading into the Super Bowl (the Rams won the game, 20 to 17). In this mightily crucial and head-to-head tussle of a game, there was a taunting penalty assessed against the 49ers linebacker. This provided a 15-yard penalty advantage to the Rams.
A Rams fan would almost certainly agree with the referees on this call. A 49ers player taunted and got caught. The appropriate penalty was assessed as per the rules of the NFL. There is no other way to interpret the situation, so say those ardent Rams fans.
A 49ers fan would undoubtedly and loudly object to the taunting claim. Sure, they might concede, it potentially had a flavor or scent of a taunt, but to actually formally call it as a taunt was completely over-the-line. In a sense, the referees stole from the 49ers and handed free yardage to the Rams. This single act by the referees could have alone been the key reason that the 49ers lost the game and ergo were wrongly “robbed” of the NFC Championship, namely as a result of a (presumedly) false assertion of a taunt. A darned shame, bellow acridly the 49ers fans.
That type of heated debate arises continually in professional football when it comes to taunting calls.
The usual argument is that the referees are unfairly tipping the scale toward one team or the other. Those refs are putting their thumb on the scale and steering a win for one team and a big zero (a loss) for the other team.
As mentioned earlier, part of the basis for such controversy is the somewhat loosey-goosey notion of what precisely constitutes a taunt. Just because the dictionary provides a definition does not mean that the definition is necessarily crisp and meticulously specified.
Speaking of specifications, we can take a look at the official NFL rulebook to see what it says about taunting.
First, be aware that the NFL rulebook does not specifically define the word “taunt” and instead merely uses the catchword within other contexts of the rules. Presumably, the referees are left to their own reasoned noggins to decide exactly what a taunt is.
As an aside, you could try and contend that this also leaves the “taunt” as a vagary for the players, for the coaches, for the fans, and any other interested parties. How is a player to know whether they have committed a taunt or not? The answer would seem to be that if a referee believes a taunt was used, a taunt indeed has occurred.
But a player might then carp that if they aren’t fully cognizant beforehand of what a taunt specifically is, how can they try and ensure that they don’t inadvertently generate a taunt, either a real taunt or an imagined taunt. Seems like you are darned if you and darned if you don’t, entirely at the whim of the referees.
Not so, exhort others. Everybody knows what a taunt is. You learn about taunts as a child. Henceforth, a taunt is obvious. You don’t need some dictionary to tell you about taunts. A grown adult that is playing professional football knows precisely what a taunt would be. Trying to hide behind fakery that taunts are ill-defined or poorly stipulated is sneaky, sickening, unprofessional, and unbefitting those that are getting paid big bucks to play the All-American sport of football.
Anyway, in terms of the NFL Official Playing Rules, we can use Section 3 on Unsportsmanlike Conduct and see that within Article 1 on Prohibited Acts there is a reference to taunting. The passage that sets the stage indicates that: “There shall be no unsportsmanlike conduct. This applies to any act which is contrary to the generally understood principles of sportsmanship. Such acts specifically include, among others…” (and then various prohibited acts are listed).
Subsection “c” states that amongst the prohibited acts is this: “Using baiting or taunting acts or words that may engender ill will between teams.”
The other references to taunting are primarily about the penalties associated with a taunting call by a referee. One such example encompasses the 15-yard penalty that was assessed against the 49ers due to the referee’s declared taunting act (presumably, allegedly, for sure).
All this talk about taunting is about to become especially prominent on the biggest global stage that happens each year, the running of the Super Bowl. The guess is that around 100 million people worldwide will watch Super Bowl 2022.
They might get an unexpected and categorically unpleasant surprise.
Already, some fans are wringing their hands that the Super Bowl might be swayed as a result of taunting calls by the referees. In short, some fans believe that by and large there is no reason for referees to be calling taunting during a momentous game like this. Just let the players do their thing and stop hammering the game with these annoying and unneeded taunting calls.
The reply to that notion is that if you don’t enforce the rules of the game, including taunting rules, you are going to have utter chaos down on the field. Players will do whatever crazy taunting actions they wish to do. Other players will react. Brawls will ensue. Cheekily, you might as well go see a hockey game instead of watching the Super Bowl if what you want to see is a spirited clash of fisticuffs and belligerent mashups.
Thankfully, the argument goes, the referees are there to put a stop to taunting. By calling a player on a taunt, even if it is admittedly a modest one, you put the kibosh on something that will otherwise get out of hand. It’s a slippery slope affair. Referees that let the players summarily toss out taunts are doing a disservice to the game. Nip the taunting in the bud and then the taunting won’t ever arise the rest of the game.
Round and round we can go on this.
I’d like to shift gears and bring up a completely different context about taunting, consisting of something that might catch you by surprise.
Are you ready?
We are potentially going to end up with AI that taunts us.
Before you reject the idea as some wide-eyed sci-fi conjecture, please know that I am not ascribing sentience to AI of today. Let’s be absolutely clear that there isn’t any AI today that is sentient, not even close. We also have no means of gauging when we might attain AI embodying sentience, nor whether it will ever occur.
I’ll say more about that in a moment.
What I am more reasonably referring to is the aspect that the AI of today can be programmed by design or by happenstance to carry out a taunting kind of act or utterance. This is done without any type of intent or similar human-like agency by the AI. It is merely the consequence of how the AI was devised, built, and fielded.
As a fast way to showcase how this could occur, let’s revisit the latest qualms about AI that is exhibiting various racial and gender biases, along with other sordid inequities. You might have heard about this since the topic has become a quite notable one, coming under the umbrella of what is generally denoted as ethical AI. There are plenty of examples of how AI For Bad has arisen, at times overshadowing the high hopes of AI For Good.
I’ve previously covered in my AI ethics discussions that facial recognition has been rife with biases and inequities, see my analyses at this link here and this link here. Simply stated, if you train an AI system that is using Machine Learning (ML) or Deep Learning (DL) with data that is already filled with such biases, the AI is using its computational pattern matching that will likely mimic or inherit mathematically those same biases.
Suppose you train an AI-based ML/DL system to recognize faces. Perchance you feed in data that has faces of a specific race and not of other races. The computational pattern matching hones in on the data and calculates how to identify faces, doing so though with a hidden racial bias toward that one race.
You then put the facial recognition system into broad use (not realizing that the hidden racial bias now resides in the devised AI system).
When faces of the racial kind that were initially trained with are detected, the ML/DL is able to ascertain to relatively high probability a given face. But when faces of other races are scanned, the ML/DL pattern matching no longer can mathematically do as good a job at facial recognition. This is bound to create untoward issues for those that are outside the facial aspects of the initial training set.
At first, there was an assumption that this type of bias was being deliberately done by the AI programmers. Though that can happen, the odds are that the use of the ML/DL was being undertaken without a proper measure of scrutiny to the training data and how the AI was being set up. There are now various ways to prod those AI developers into being careful about how they utilize ML/DL, aiming to try and prevent these inherent inequities from getting embedded into modern-day AI systems.
I bring up that background so that you’ll then be able to readily grasp how the act of taunting can get immersed into an AI system.
Again, this has nothing to do with sentience.
Envision that we are devising an AI system that can do conversational interactions, akin to an Alexa or Siri. I recently covered the real-life circumstance of Alexa issuing verbal instructions to a 10-year old about trying to do a “fun” experiment that would involve pressing a penny into an electrical socket, see my discussion at this link here.
That happened due to the Alexa system rummaging around on the Internet and trying to computationally pattern match to whatever it might find. In this case, there was a viral “game” of doing the penny in an electrical socket gambit, wrongfully and dangerously so, that had been posted all across the Internet. It became a type of training data for the Alexa system.
The same kind of misguided data-related inheritance can occur in the auspices of taunting.
Imagine that an AI-based conversational system starts examining utterances posted on the Internet that are taunts. We’ll summarily agree for the moment that those are in fact taunts, which I mention since I earlier emphasized that we might at times find ourselves disagreeing about what a taunt precisely is. Assume for sake of discussion that the AI found genuinely inarguable taunts.
Those taunts then are ingrained into the mathematical formulations within the AI programming. When later on the AI seeks to issue some statements or commands, there is a solid chance that the utterances will be presented or displayed as though they are taunts.
That’s how the humans receiving such utterances will likely believe they are being treated. The AI is taunting me, the person will be thinking. What is that all about? How come I’m being taunted. Why would a machine taunt me? Ridiculous, outrageous, nutty, scary, and all-around outlandish.
Realize though that the AI system has no knowledge or comprehension per se that can alert it to the realization that taunts are being uttered by the conversational programming.
We would all hope and assume that a human that utters taunts is presumably going to realize what they are doing, either by self-awareness or by the reaction of the recipient. None of that is immediately the case for the AI, though we could try to program the AI to have a type of programmed capability to detect what it is doing and how the user is reacting.
All told, there is as much a chance of AI systems embodying taunting as there are of the AI embodying the various biases and inequities that we’ve already seen being exhibited. The whole kit and kaboodle are cut from the same cloth, as it were.
We can consider how this AI-based taunting might produce terrifyingly egregious results.
How might that happen?
The use case of AI-based self-driving cars comes to mind.
Here’s a noteworthy question that is worth pondering: Is it possible that the AI of AI-based self-driving cars might embody programmatically a taunting capacity, and if so, what might that portend?
Allow me a moment to unpack the question.
First, note that there isn’t a human driver involved in a true self-driving car. Keep in mind that true self-driving cars are driven via an AI driving system. There isn’t a need for a human driver at the wheel, nor is there a provision for a human to drive the vehicle. For my extensive and ongoing coverage of Autonomous Vehicles (AVs) and especially self-driving cars, see the link here.
I’d like to further clarify what is meant when I refer to true self-driving cars.
Understanding The Levels Of Self-Driving Cars
As a clarification, true self-driving cars are ones that the AI drives the car entirely on its own and there isn’t any human assistance during the driving task.
These driverless vehicles are considered Level 4 and Level 5 (see my explanation at this link here), while a car that requires a human driver to co-share the driving effort is usually considered at Level 2 or Level 3. The cars that co-share the driving task are described as being semi-autonomous, and typically contain a variety of automated add-on’s that are referred to as ADAS (Advanced Driver-Assistance Systems).
There is not yet a true self-driving car at Level 5, which we don’t yet even know if this will be possible to achieve, and nor how long it will take to get there.
Meanwhile, the Level 4 efforts are gradually trying to get some traction by undergoing very narrow and selective public roadway trials, though there is controversy over whether this testing should be allowed per se (we are all life-or-death guinea pigs in an experiment taking place on our highways and byways, some contend, see my coverage at this link here).
Since semi-autonomous cars require a human driver, the adoption of those types of cars won’t be markedly different than driving conventional vehicles, so there’s not much new per se to cover about them on this topic (though, as you’ll see in a moment, the points next made are generally applicable).
For semi-autonomous cars, it is important that the public needs to be forewarned about a disturbing aspect that’s been arising lately, namely that despite those human drivers that keep posting videos of themselves falling asleep at the wheel of a Level 2 or Level 3 car, we all need to avoid being misled into believing that the driver can take away their attention from the driving task while driving a semi-autonomous car.
You are the responsible party for the driving actions of the vehicle, regardless of how much automation might be tossed into a Level 2 or Level 3.
Self-Driving Cars And AI-Based Taunting Woes
For Level 4 and Level 5 true self-driving vehicles, there won’t be a human driver involved in the driving task.
All occupants will be passengers.
The AI is doing the driving.
One aspect to immediately discuss entails the fact that the AI involved in today’s AI driving systems is not sentient. In other words, the AI is altogether a collective of computer-based programming and algorithms, and most assuredly not able to reason in the same manner that humans can.
Why is this added emphasis about the AI not being sentient?
Because I want to underscore that when discussing the role of the AI driving system, I am not ascribing human qualities to the AI. Please be aware that there is an ongoing and dangerous tendency these days to anthropomorphize AI. In essence, people are assigning human-like sentience to today’s AI, despite the undeniable and inarguable fact that no such AI exists as yet.
With that clarification, you can envision that the AI driving system won’t natively somehow “know” about the facets of driving. Driving and all that it entails will need to be programmed as part of the hardware and software of the self-driving car.
Let’s dive into the myriad of aspects that come to play on this topic.
First, it is important to realize that not all AI self-driving cars are the same. Each automaker and self-driving tech firm is taking its approach to devising self-driving cars. As such, it is difficult to make sweeping statements about what AI driving systems will do or not do.
Furthermore, whenever stating that an AI driving system doesn’t do some particular thing, this can, later on, be overtaken by developers that in fact program the computer to do that very thing. Step by step, AI driving systems are being gradually improved and extended. An existing limitation today might no longer exist in a future iteration or version of the system.
I trust that provides a sufficient litany of caveats to underlie what I am about to relate.
We are primed now to do a deep dive into self-driving cars and the role of taunting.
Let’s take a look at two examples illustrating how AI-based taunting could potentially occur in the realm of self-driving cars. Consider these two examples as merely broadly indicative. There are many more ways that AI taunting could arise.
You get into a self-driving car to take a ride to your local grocery store. As is typical of most self-driving cars, the AI system might ask you some brief questions before the ride gets underway. Think of this conversational interaction as occurring in a like manner to having a chat with Alexa or Siri.
But we’ll assume that the AI conversational component has picked up a bit of a nasty habit, namely it has computationally pattern matched onto taunting vocalizations from some training data that it has had access to.
We’ll begin the saga without the taunting and gradually find it becoming more expansive in a taunting style.
The AI asks whether you want a smooth and abundantly cautious lift to the store, or whether you are in a hurry and want to proceed as quickly as legally and safely allowed. You answer that your preference would be the slower and calmer form of driving.
You’ll have to imagine this next depiction as being awash with a stink of heavy sarcasm. It is hard for me to convey in words on a page the overarching tone and connotation, so bolster your reading of the words as though they were bitterly spoken in a quite derisive mocking fashion.
The AI responds to the rider: “Confirmed that you want the sluggish ride. Seems like I’ve got a dreary fuddy-duddy in my car today.”
Say what?
I’m sure that any of us would be startled at such a response. Did the AI just call you a fuddy-duddy? Was this a dig? It had to be. What else could it be? There’s no other way to seemingly interpret it.
Remember, this is not sentience. It is programmed, in a manner of speaking.
In any case, you resolve that this must be a fluke, or maybe you weren’t listening closely and misheard the AI utterance.
You sit back in your seat and idly look around as the AI driving system guides the autonomous vehicle down the street and on its way to the grocery store. It’s an overcast day and there’s been some rain throughout the day. You are relieved that you don’t have to drive amidst the adverse weather nor deal with the nutty traffic of human drivers that don’t seem to know how to drive in the rain. The AI is doing all the driving for you.
Upon hearing your growling stomach, you ask the AI to swing through a local fast-food joint to get yourself a coffee and one of those delicious egg and cheese sandwiches.
The AI responds: “Yes, I will drive to the fast-food eatery. You should have told me at the start of the drive that you wanted such a pathing diversion. Make sure to think straighter next time.”
Ouch, that taunt hurt. You are now nearly convinced that the AI is taunting you. Outrageous!
You tell the AI to stop speaking that way.
The AI acknowledges your request: “I will be more careful in my phrasing. As a driving status update, we are almost at the drive-thru window and you can order your fatso breakfast or I can electronically relay the order. Which do you prefer?”
Whoa, you were plainly being taken down a stride for wanting to get that scrumptious but admittedly fattening egg and cheese sandwich. The thing is, you don’t even take this kind of gruff from your significant other, let alone being taunted by a darned machine.
You’ve been taunted by AI, specifically an AI driving system.
That covers the first example.
If it seems outstretched, this is admittedly somewhat contrived to get across the overarching point. The taunting could be much subtler, but then in this example, it might not have seemed especially exasperating to you. I added some steroids to the vocalization to make the taunting more apparent.
In this second example, we will venture away from AI taunting as a mere annoyance and move into the considered dangerous realm of AI taunting as a driving-related endangerment. Again, allow me a dollop of embellishment to get across the point.
You are once again riding in a self-driving car and heading to the grocery store. The AI has been entirely neutral and there is no hint of any taunting.
When you arrive at the grocery store, the AI driving system is supposed to find a convenient spot to drop you off. Since it has been raining, the preferred drop-off would be as close to the front doors of the grocery store as possible. Makes sense.
Sure enough, the AI driving system guides the self-driving car toward the front of the grocery store. All is good. You gather your belongings and get ready to exit from the autonomous vehicle. All of a sudden, a human-driven car tries to also aim for that same spot in front of the grocery store. Looks like that driver wants to pick up someone that is coming out of the grocery store.
I’m guessing that you’ve found yourself in similar situations. Maybe you were trying to do a drop-off and had another car cut you off, seeking to use that same location for either a pick-up or a drop-off. Or, perhaps you’ve tried to park in a busy parking lot and had the arduous chore of eyeing an open parking spot and then having to contend with another driver also vying for the same spot.
Does that seem familiar?
I would think so.
What should the AI driving system do?
The conventional politically-correct answer is that the AI driving system is presumably programmed to always be civil and polite, thus it would defer to the human driver and not try to outmaneuver the other car toward taking that spot in front of the grocery store. The human driver wins, the self-driving car has to drive around and wait, or find an alternative location for the drop-off.
Not everyone believes this to be a good idea.
Imagine if human drivers knew that AI driving systems will always be the fall guy, acting with great timidity and deferring unquestionably to human drivers. A famous example of this has to do with an instance in the earlier days of self-driving cars, which I’ve covered at this link here.
Essentially, a self-driving car came up to a four-way stop. The self-driving car had the right-of-way. A human-driven car just split seconds later also came to the same four-way stop, at the other side of the intersection. The AI driving system made sure to fully and legally come to a full stop. The human driver did not, and instead invoked the ever-classic rolling stop.
When the self-driving car detected the rolling stop, this was construed as a safety issue that the other car was seemingly entering into the intersection, even though the self-driving car had the right-of-way. No matter, the AI was programmed to wait until the other car cleared through the intersection.
Well, another human-driven car came up to one of the other stop signs. It too did a rolling stop. For the next series of human-driven cars, each tricked the self-driving car into staying still. Only until there weren’t any more human-driven cars at the four-way stop did the AI driving system proceed forward.
The moral to the story is that if we have AI driving systems always being strictly legal and strictly timid, human drivers are going to figure this out. The end result will be that human drivers will relentlessly take advantage of self-driving cars. You might not care about whether the AI is being bamboozled, but the riders in self-driving cars aren’t going to like this. They are going to have their rides be derailed, slowed down, and otherwise hampered by those devious and cunning human drivers.
One ongoing debate that is taking place in the self-driving car realm is whether AI driving systems should be programmed for a successive set of levels of driving aggression. We could in some ascertained means ratchet up or down the driving aggressiveness. This is either a brilliant idea or a notion that is going to lead to a catastrophe, according to whichever pundit you discuss this with. See my coverage at this link here.
Let’s get back to the AI taunting.
Recall that the self-driving car was contending with a human-driven car to try and snag a spot in front of the grocery store. We would assume that the AI driving system would not tussle with the human driver.
Suppose though that the AI driving system has been trained on some data that included aggressive drivers, ones that you could construe as willing to taunt other drivers. This taunting can be a means of getting your driving preferences and spurning the driving antics of other drivers, or in some instances, it can be downright meanness and something that consequently generates road rage among human drivers.
The AI driving system guns the engine of the self-driving car and steers the autonomous vehicle directly at the human-driven car. If someone did this to you, I’m sure you would be taken aback, though we all have had human drivers that seemed to act this way.
Is the AI taunting the other car and its human driver?
You might quibble whether this is a taunt. Of course, as we earlier covered, trying to pin down what a taunt consists of is a murky affair.
Conclusion
Are you ready for some football?
For those of you that are going to watch the Super Bowl, keep your eyes peeled for those taunting penalties. I guess that amounts to roughly 200 million eyeballs that are going to be looking for taunting moments.
Will some of the football players get away with a taunt scot-free?
Probably.
Will some of the football players get nailed by the referees for doing taunting?
Probably.
Will there be a taunting call that gets fans riled up and they will spill their beers and yell to the rooftops that the referee is out of his or her mind?
I’ll put that at extremely high odds.
And will we eventually and inexorably encounter AI that has a whisp of taunting somewhere within its programming?
I’m going to go out on a limb and say that though I won’t predict which team will win the Super Bowl, I am absolutely completely utterly totally sure that we’ll have taunting AI.
Don’t let it get to you.
We’re still human and it is not.
Oopsie, I might have just taunted AI.
