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It is surprising to anyone who doesn't work in machine learning. Personally, I remember Google telling me that they "may use recordings to improve the voice re
by kentonv 7y ago
It is surprising to anyone who doesn't work in machine learning.
Personally, I remember Google telling me that they "may use recordings to improve the voice recognition quality" or something like that. What I did not realize is that that meant humans would be listening. Sure, any ML expert will say "Well obviously! A machine can't train itself!", and in retrospect I wonder why this was not obvious to me. But here I am, a software engineer who worked for Google for eight years, and it was not obvious to me, somehow.
These services need to state more clearly how data is being used. When you sign up, it needs to say, clearly: "Human employees of [company] may listen to your recordings for the purpose of improving voice recognition."
I think the reason we are not presented with such clear language is because the people building these products know they'll lose a lot of users. But that's no excuse to mislead people.
- SpaceRaccoon 7y ago> Well obviously! A machine can't train itself! In some cases it can. That's what unsupervised learning is.
- kentonv 7y agoSee that's sort of what I thought but now I'm being told it was silly to expect that. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
- wolfi1 7y agoone expert in ML told me once: unsupervised ML is a myth. I tend to believe him.
- tormeh 7y agoIt's better to say that unsupervised ML is merely indirectly supervised ML.
- PhilippGille 7y agoWasn't there a second version of AlphaGo that was trained only by playing against itself without external input and turned out to be even better than the first version that was trained with external input? Isn't that unsupervised learning?