Hey, it's Sean. I know you're thinking it's Sunday. Get a life.

But listen, I had to come in to tell you about a new show called Reset.

It's from Recode here at Vox and it's all about technology and how it's changing the way we live and it's gonna be coming out

three days a week including on Sunday and that's why we wanted to introduce this show to you in our feed on a Sunday.

It's a great episode all about artificial intelligence.

I'm gonna let the host of Reset, Arielle Zouen Ross, take it away. Enjoy.

A few years ago, David Hart came home from work to find his son and his wife agonizing over a problem.

My son was on the computer and he was in tears and my wife was really frustrated and you know the second I walked in

she asked me to step in and help out and she was on the point of tears too.

His son was in the fourth grade and he had to write an essay for school but rather than hand in the paper to his teacher the next day,

he was supposed to submit the essay online that night and it would get graded right away.

The website is called Utah Compose and the way it works is it has automated essay scoring software.

The keyword here is automated. No human required. The grading is done by an algorithm.

To pass the assignment, the essay had to hit a certain score.

You know, you had to get something like 25 points out of 30 points.

But nothing his son had written so far had made the grade.

And he only got a certain number of tries and they were running out of tries.

The instructions said you're going to be scored on your ability to communicate clearly in the fewest number of words.

Right so get the point across which seems like a good goal for writing.

But when David's wife tried to make the writing more concise, it didn't help.

Her essay got scored even lower.

They were following the suggestions that the software was giving them and they still weren't getting increases in scores and so they were just getting more and more frustrated.

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