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Hold on here. This article seems to have buried a pretty important piece of information wayyy down in the middle of the text. > Gender bias was not the only is
by HashHishBang 8y ago
Hold on here. This article seems to have buried a pretty important piece of information wayyy down in the middle of the text.
> Gender bias was not the only issue. Problems with the data that underpinned the models’ judgments meant that unqualified candidates were often recommended for all manner of jobs, the people said. With the technology returning results almost at random, Amazon shut down the project, they said.
Granted an article isn't going to get as much attention without an attractive headline but that seems a far more likely reason to have an AI based recruiting recommendation scrapped. The discovery of a negative weight associated with "women's" or graduates of two unnamed women's colleges is notable but if it's tossing out results "almost at random" then...well there seems to be bigger problems?
- user812 8y agoThe media is no longer reporting things. You can't make money with reporting. The media is actively creating narratives, and one of the narratives that people are fed nowadays is that women are victims. Men and women are pitted against each other. Due to the way the media has evolved people consume their own biases and most often just read the headlines.
- HashHishBang 8y agoI mean, yeah you're not wrong. I try not to be too cynical about the whole thing even if I think the narrative is suspect. Yes women and minority representation in tech is a potential issue but I really want to know more about the AI recommendation system for potential hires. Especially if it was giving out spurious recommendations. It's amazon, I can't imagine how many millions went into something like that. We'll almost certainly not get a postmortem but it's definitely intriguing.
- njharman 8y agoNo longer? Read some history, start with yellow journalism and muckraking. Learning history will teach you more about things today than any news source.
- rrcaptain 8y agoThe media has always been about narratives.
- Faark 8y agoThe article leaves a lot open to interpretation, including what was expected of the tools... that could range from providing some beneficial hints to replacing all hiring. As you rightfully remark, having the tool rank candidates for highly specific jobs and its tech requirements would be a great achievement. But is also a big challenge, thus they probably were aiming at something more basic initially. Building models for broad categories like "manager" or "box packer" and hope they will detect soft skills or work ethics seems more achievable. Thus the additional star rating that can be used for hiring and provides some value. Now having known limited capabilities isn't great. But those can and will be worked on. Unknown / unexpected biases wont, making finding them important.