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How a Machine Can Tell If You’re an Asshole
An interview with the designers behind the “Are You The Asshole” bot
Reddit’s r/AmITheAsshole is one of the most entertaining subreddits on the entire site. Though it started in 2013, the subreddit’s popularity increased during the pandemic when people, isolated from social interaction, started stewing about the little things. Are you the asshole when you punched your roommate after they ate all your food? How about when you screamed at your parents when they made you the supermarket gopher? Well, if you ask, thousands of people will give their opinion to let you know whether or not you’re the asshole.
Internet artist Morry Kolman, along with developer Alex Petros, dove into the immense data set of r/AmITheAsshole and built Are You The Asshole, a bot that helps teach us about bias, machine learning, and the beauty of human-computer interaction.
Something that often goes unconsidered on Reddit is how it is also a vast archive of human opinion data. The subreddit is one of the largest troves of nuanced data that exists. If you want to know whether you’re the asshole, you have to consider that each person…
