3 ms·

Someone told me a few months ago to search Google images for 'white family' vs 'black family'. And the results were remarkable. White families turn out to be a

• thu2111 6y ago
  I used to work at Google. In the old days, before it was apparently internally hijacked by social activists. These sorts of things can occur by accident. It sounds implausible but it used to happen all the time. Thing to remember is that even after decades of work Google is not really a question answering machine. It's still, at its core, matching words and phrases to things it found on the internet. The most famous problem was "Google-bombing" where people realised they could control the top result for obscure phrases by using links, like [is george bush an idiot]. There was one related to Jews as well that I don't remember. Some mitigations were added and it went away as a problem. The [white families] vs [black families] thing sounds a lot like the older example of [white inventors] vs [black inventors]: https://external-preview.redd.it/N6gh6oArK2EWeIoaPJkoD-mDcsuJ_ShHwrt7VAGcJvU.png?auto=webp&s=b62ff16d727eb53a40124486a75ccbc541a9633c https://external-preview.redd.it/N6gh6oArK2EWeIoaPJkoD-mDcsu... As you can see if you search Google Images for [white american inventors] then you get the same results today. This isn't caused by racism in the algorithm or at Google but rather the fact that you're searching in English and most English speakers on the internet are from America or western Europe i.e. white. Thus it's rare to prefix professions with "white" when describing photos because that's the assumed default. How many articles are out there discussing "white inventors", do you think? Or even "white families"? Blacks on the other hand are a minority of the population and especially rare in things like "inventing", which is a rather archaic job description and thus biases old to begin with. It's practically guaranteed that any page matching the phrase "white american inventors" is going to be primarily a discussion of race, not inventing. To see that this is true just search Google Images for [family]. What a shock - all the photos are of white people. Now that said, back when I was working there people would understand these things, and give Google the benefit of the doubt. They were right to do so because in my entire time there I never saw any evidence of specific biases being introduced into web search for political reasons, nor did I see any evidence the executives in charge of web search were biased. For a search engine that trust seemed important, at least at the time. These days Google has changed and now routinely brags about its extreme biases. Firing Damore was a turning point. Now people see things like those search results or Churchill disappearing and assume the worst, instead of assuming the best. Because the true explanations are usually proprietary and arcane, this is leading to a downward spiral of trust. It's especially hard to defend Google's lack of bias these days, even knowing things like the above explanations, because they keep doing dumb stuff like publishing papers on "debiasing AI", which when read turn out to be about biasing AI towards left-wing sensibilities. For example making it believe incorrect things about gender distributions amongst the professions. Is Google search still unbiased? Well ... I search using DuckDuckGo these days by default. Just in case.
  • raarts 6y ago
    Thanks for your answer. Unfortunately not explaining these things in public feeds public distrust, and to be fair, I now look at google more suspiciously as well. Because well, things like this keep popping up, conservative employees being afraid to speak out, the collective crying session video after Trump was elected, please let everyone go back to implementing great software and products. I need a search engine I can trust is not tampered with.