FIGARODIGITAL.CO.UK
Pollsters Trumped by AI Predictions
Donald Trump remained the underdog in the eyes of pollsters until the bitter end. But unlike experts and political
Whether you’ve been left reeling or celebrating the result of the US election, one thing is for certain – President-elect
C
ommissioned by ITV News to create an AI bot, Havas worked with IBM Watson (an AI created by
IBM and licensed by several companies including Havas), to analyse and understand human behaviour – and furthermore to predict human behaviour.
Data Doesn’t Lie
“Usually we do it with a marketing hat on,” explains Faye Raincock, European communications, Havas. “[We] try and predict people’s buying decisions and behaviour when it comes to relationships with brands; but what we’ve developed here is unique in that and analyse voting behaviour.” Using billions of data sources,
Eagle AI analysed any social media posts and comments related to the election; but it also listened to all of the debates, speeches across the election campaign, and campaign videos. On top of this, it also monitored any press coverage and its virality.
“What was particularly clever was
that it was trained to understand emotion, sentiment and tone – and been done relating to voting intention,” Raincock says. “Instead of traditional polling, it dug beneath the surface into how people actually felt, and tried to predict behaviour. ITV never asked us to predict the outcome of the election, largely because they have an existing relationship with traditional pollsters in the US. But as part of our job, to understand what mattered to people, we began looking at voting intent. We felt that was an important parameter to understand behaviour. And we found that the AI was predicting a Trump victory from quite soon into its analysis.”
Whilst a great many of us may have
52 issue 29 winter 2016
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