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Try searching Google Images for "brazilian". Her point is quite valid, and also well recognized in at least some part of the tech industry: when you "blindly"
by ucaetano 9y ago
Try searching Google Images for "brazilian".
Her point is quite valid, and also well recognized in at least some part of the tech industry: when you "blindly" optimize for a certain audience, you risk picking up the biases of that audience.
So, if you want to appeal to a broader audience than your current one, you might need to manually tune your system to remove some of the biases from your original audience.
This is particularly important, if not from a human perspective, at least from a business perspective, when the bias of your current audience is about the larger audience.
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- EpicBlackCrayon 9y agoI think the real problem here is that Google, for all of its algorithmic might, is somehow powerless to create algorithms that don't have this problem in the first place. It signals to me that there aren't people thinking about this kind of stuff, both down in the trenches and in the upper echelons. Maybe it's as the author contends, a bigger issue with ethics in tech in general.
- pishpash 9y agoThey're not powerless. They just didn't bother.
- Retric 9y agoThey can't change math because people don't like the results. They can stop relying on algorithms because the underlying data reflects social bias, or use them and reflect society. But, they are always going to upset some group some of the time because social norms are not consistent across society. IMO, attacking Google on this is pointless, deal with the actual problem.
- pishpash 9y agoNever asked to change math or stop relying on algorithms. If you think those are the only solutions you're not thinking hard enough. Google is part of the problem, dealing with the problem involves Google solving its part of the problem.
- ucaetano 9y ago> If you think those are the only solutions you're not thinking hard enough. Yeah, great contribution right there! If we haven't cured cancer is because we aren't thinking hard enough!
- sosuke 9y agoWow, those results are so different from Bing Images for the same search.
- Consultant32452 9y agoThat's really amazing. There's a similar situation when you search "American scientists." Interestingly the regular search results are very different, but the image search is similar.
- EpicBlackCrayon 9y agoYeah, the Bing results are much better IMO, I wonder if MS solved this problem?
- tux1968 9y agoThere isn't just a risk of picking up biases -- there is an absolute guarantee that biases exist and always will. In a sense that's the whole goal when giving _relevant_ results. The idea is to return information biased towards interesting and useful results. I wish Google wasn't biased against the restaurant around the corner from me when I search for "The Trumpet", but it is. That's as it should be of course, since the audience for that result is so small. All we're really talking about is a project that will never be completed of tailoring search results for the largest audience possible -- which is inherently a moving target. Doing it manually as you suggest is likely hopeless and more politically fraught.
- ucaetano 9y ago> Doing it manually as you suggest is likely hopeless and more politically fraught. Yes, but, sadly, necessary.