Big news: the Wall Street Journal has discovered that automatic profiling algorithms sometimes don’t work! Oh, the horror! This story, which has been making the rounds like wildfire (apparently driven by the Beavis-and-Butthead-like meme that calling a straight person gay is high humor) points out that TiVo’s “suggestions” feature sometimes gets things wrong.
Any parent could have pointed this out, of course. Our TiVo is permanently confused by being asked to record three distinctly different sets of shows:
- Stuff I like (including Alias and 24); formerly including The X-Files and The Simpsons
- Arlene’s favorites (ranging from Boston Public and Smallville to Simply Quilting)
- Shows we tape for the kids (including Sesame Street, Liberty’s Kids, and Justice League)
- Occasional events, usually church-related, like the 1940 biopic about Brigham Young or the semi-annual General Conference broadcasts.
Fortunately, with liberal use of the thumbs-up and thumbs-down buttons, we’ve been able to weed out most of its bad decisions (like recording the Weather Channel and NASA Channel, which we often have on as background noise). This sometimes backfires, though:
Mr. Karlsson, 26, says he “pre-emptively” found all the religious shows in his TV listings and used the “thumbs down” button on his remote control to tell TiVo he has no interest in them. (Giving three thumbs down is the best way to block a program.) After that, his TiVo recorded movies about creepy homicides. “They all have titles like ‘Murder on Skeleton Isle,’ ” says the computer system administrator in Cambridge, Mass.
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