This all may be true but there’s an issue when the model produces blue eyes when presented with a blurred African American face. I think much of the controversy

This all may be true but there’s an issue when the model produces blue eyes when presented with a blurred African American face. I think much of the controversy would be diffused had the authors addressed this directly and used it as a way to discuss how bias sneaks into our models of the world. Philosophically I find ML’s tendency to reflect the biases we bring to it very revealing. In some ways it shows us what we’ve built, the underlying biases that we’d rather argue about and ignore. When an algorithm selects longer sentences for black men than white men, we rightly see that as racism. Some say, “use better data, we’ll then be objective!” But I wonder if a better initial reaction is, “wow, look how badly out system has failed that it would produce such a bad dataset.” Never mind that maybe it’s not actually possible to be objective and that’s the point. Math doesn’t lie, maybe when we make a racist model we’re failing to see the mirror it’s holding up for us.