The FOJ is not going to give it up so easily. Move over King Dave.
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Jim Amorin? I was just reading his rubbish article in the latest "The Appraisal Journal," a good example of the hogwash they publish.
Navigating Ethical Frontiers:
Real Estate Appraisal in the
Age of Artificial Intelligence
1. He can't even define "AI". He does have a section: "What is Artificial Intelligence?" He starts with:
"The seminal definition of artificial intelligence as“the science and engineering of making intelligent machines” is generally attributed to John McCarthy, who coined the term artificial intelligence in 1955. " Oh, great, that really helps. Then he ends with: "For example, Google's search algorighm uses AI to analyze the content on web pages and rank results." He mentions all kinds of things in between - but never gives a definition of AI. So, we are left to wonder what exactly he is talking about. --- Because he wanders over a gigantic landscape of
so and so says this and
so and so says that and
it's not this and it's not that
2. Then we have his lengthy and very misleading sections on bias and transparency. Bias should be easy. He spends a whopping amount of time describing how important transparency is. He says: "The principle of distributing responsibility refers to equitably sharing decision-making authority among the components of an AI system. " THIS IS SO STUPID. He has it all screwed up. Right here STOP. This guy just went bonkers. [ Now if he had instead said something about distributing responsibility between the stakeholders of an AI system, that would perhaps make some sense.]
3. For anyone's edification, AI system like ChatGPT, which he mentioned, are based on highly complex neural networks which even the best developers cannot fully explain. They just work ... Well that is to say, the result of their output is the result of thousands and thousands of weighted connections that have been developed with trial and error guessing by a super computer. If you look at them, you are going to just see a complex spiderweb of connections that really doesn't make sense.
AI tools like ChatGPT can be helpful to appraisers to get their work done. Sure. But what is missing in Advanced Appraisal, is really and most importantly, a lack of mathematical and anallytical expertise on the part of appraisers.
I consider Data Mining part of AI, some would say it is "Machine Learning" rather than AI, - but it is still AI, because neural networks are machine learning as well. Only MARS, which I use, is a more controlled type of machine learning - that actually is transparent.
Amorin, in this regard is a charlatan, and one would have to assume the same can be said of all his "peer reviewers."
End of story.
[Well not quite. If in his conclusion, if he had said something about appraisers needing to learn specific hard skills such as programming and data mining, - I would definitely have given him a pass. But he really says nothing specific, just the usual generic blah, blah, blah. And what else can we expect? The AI is in no position to teach the new skills needed. They don't have the money - it's mostly going to their "leadership,." The organization doesn't have what is required. It is irrevocably outdated and saddled with an entrenched bureaucracy. It is beyond repair. It dies a slow death. ]
