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There’s a zealous push by a small but extremely vocal fringe to impose their very particular worldview onto emerging AI/ML models like this. They refer to it a

There’s a zealous push by a small but extremely vocal fringe to impose their very particular worldview onto emerging AI/ML models like this. They refer to it as “eliminating bias”, but it’s really just an attempt to mold these new technologies into conformance with one very specific set of ideological commitments. Proponents view it as some kind of obvious universal good, and are confused when anyone else is appalled by the blind foolishness of it all.

mlyle 4y ago
> They refer to it as “eliminating bias”, I don't think, e.g. being able to handle black faces correctly is some sort of massive ideological commitment. So let's not pretend that the entire concern of bias in AI is irrelevant, no matter where you stand on gender. > conformance with one very specific set of ideological commitments You know-- let's just talk about basic respect and dignity: if someone strongly wants to be referred to in a particular way, the polite response is to respect their wishes. If there's a lot of people in this category, it makes sense for your system to address it. If you instead build your system in a way that you don't achieve this, you're being rude. If you use old training data and refer to people as a "Mongoloid" as a result-- don't be surprised that people are offended. Ditto, if you use old training data about gender that doesn't match many peoples' current expectations.
- nonethewiser 4y ago
  > I don't think, e.g. being able to handle black faces correctly is some sort of massive ideological commitment. Why did you suggest THIS as an example of what hes talking about? He doesn't indicate that he disagrees with this case. Furthermore,that sounds like a problem of having incomplete training data. Regardless, manually tweaking a model points to a failure in the process somewhere.
  - mlyle 4y ago
    > Why did you suggest THIS as an example of what hes talking about? He seems to be pooh-poohing the entire idea of "eliminating bias" in AI. So I felt it was important to * point out that there are clear cases of bias in AI no matter where you stand on gender * move on to explain a closely related case (using historical speech about race could be offensive) * use the lesson to show that using historical speech about gender could be problematic as well > Furthermore,that sounds like a problem of having incomplete training data. Training a model from historical data can only reflect historical approaches. The social conventions around gender are changing rapidly and are contentious. > Regardless, manually tweaking a model points to a failure in the process somewhere. Here, there's no manual tweaking of the model: merely a refusal to return results in an area where the model has proven problematic.
    - nonethewiser 4y ago
      I don't think your example is indicative of what he opposed. If you can't effectively train something from existing data then cherry picking results according to different values isnt going to fix it. Your example has quietly shifted from facial recognition of different races to speech about different races. I cant even be sure of what you're talking about other than the fact that you will oppose criticism of imparting political bias into models.
      - magicalist 4y ago
        > If you can't effectively train something from existing data then cherry picking results according to different values isnt going to fix it. Given the variance in the utility of copilot's suggestions, this doesn't seem true on it's face. Define "effectively" here and I think cherry picking would definitely fall within its range.
      - mlyle 4y ago
        > then cherry picking results according to different values isnt going to fix it. Again: "merely a refusal to return results in an area where the model has proven problematic." > Your example has quietly shifted from facial recognition of different races to speech about different races. Again, three points: * First, no matter how you feel about gender: bias in AI is a problem, as evidenced by issues with recognizing black faces. * Second, there's some obvious cases where we can all agree that using past training data could result in things that are currently offensive. There are pieces of language we pretty much all agree we should use differently now to avoid offense (e.g. mongoloid). * Third, I believe that gender is one of these cases. Social mores are evolving. Using conventions from the past when our collective norms are changing on the span of months basically guarantees offense.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- davoneus 4y ago
  I call complete and utter BS. This is in no way different than disabling a word procesors autocorrect when a writer uses the term gender in their novel. The programmer should be able to use whatever the hell terms they want to use in their program. If the customer base doesn't like it that's their right. But it's not the right of the damn language parser programmer.
  - mlyle 4y ago
    > But it's not the right of the damn language parser programmer. This isn't a language parser. This is a tool that suggests implementations of small portions of code. If the training data is out of date, it's quite reasonable for people employing that model to decide it shouldn't return results based on the out-of-date training data. Even about completely different things. If the output is C code containing gets(), maybe we should decline to return the result. > he programmer should be able to use whatever the hell terms they want to use in their program. Indeed, it leaves it completely up to the programmer by refusing to suggest an implementation that would favor either side of the debate.
    - GameOfFrowns 4y ago
      >If the training data is out of date, it's quite reasonable for people employing that model to decide it shouldn't return results based on the out-of-date training data. It's not "out-of-date". That's just the kind of pilpul semantic framing that these activists engage in since "out-of-date" implies "bad". The data is just not in line with their artificially made-up ideology. A demand which one, even as the best "ally" in the world, could never satisfy anyway, since the grievance grifting relies on always coming up with new issues, you just have to look at the shift from "equality" to "equity" or from "microaggressions" to "nanoaggressions"
      - mlyle 4y ago
        All social conventions are artificially made-up ideology. If you insist on calling a black person a "negro", despite its change in connotation over time, you are not being very nice. If you train an AI, or a person, using old books to call someone a "negro", you're condoning and continuing offensive behavior. Ditto, here. > since the grievance grifting relies on always coming up with new issues, We pretty clearly, culturally, have a whole lot of issues. Becoming more nuanced in how we label them makes sense. And, of course, language changes rapidly. It especially changes rapidly when we're talking about marginalized groups. Pejoration is a process by which a word associated with marginalized groups become offensive over time. "Idiot", "moron", "retard" were all originally clinical and relatively non-offensive words, but society as a whole ended up changing them to include a value judgment. The euphemism treadmill is annoying, but insisting on continuing to call someone something that has developed a negative value judgment is not really good, either.
- agileAlligator 4y ago
  > if someone strongly wants to be referred to in a particular way, the polite response is to respect their wishes Would you also respect the wishes of a schizophrenic person, if they say much the same thing? If they say that they are actually an alien from outer space, would you play along?
  - aaomidi 4y ago
    So how and why do you jump to this extreme?
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
  - magicalist 4y ago
    For 95+% of people I interact with in a given day, it's none of my business and not at all my job to police whether a person is asking me to call them by their "real" name or whatever it is your questions are trying to get at.
  - mlyle 4y ago
    > Would you also respect the wishes of a schizophrenic person, if they say much the same thing? In general, I would respect someone's wishes. If they want to be Mork from outer space, K. Of course, there are some very limited cases where we may reasonably believe that playing along is harmful either to ourselves or to the other person. If there's a broad medical consensus that something is harmful to someone, then maybe we shouldn't do it. A biologically female person who wants to be called "they," because they have decided they don't like the connotations attached to "she" right now, doesn't rise anywhere close to that in my opinion.
- lmm 4y ago
  - mlyle 4y ago
    > Removing your face-recognition function because it's less effective on black faces is certainly a substantial ideological commitment. Deploying your face-recognition function for something critical that impacts user quality of life, even if it doesn't recognize black faces well, is an ideological commitment by default. > That's not generally true. It's absolutely generally true. We generally call people by the name they request; if they don't like us referring to their race or features in a certain way, we stop. > We don't give noble or professional titles Are you suggesting that having a naturally born penis is some kind of equivalent signifier to being a P.Eng? > focused on the feelings of some very small groups I think you are underestimating how big of a change is afoot in the 13-25 demographic.
    - lmm 4y ago
      - mlyle 4y ago
        > In terms of how much difference it makes to someone going to dinner with them in a casual social context? Yes, it probably is. Anyone can date whomever they want based on whatever criteria they want. But if someone wants to be called "he" despite not being born with a penis-- what's the big deal? Are you being harmed so much by complying? > > if they don't like us referring to their race or features in a certain way, we stop. > Maybe to their face. Well, here we're talking about the code we're writing that will presumably be telling them "to their face" in some context. And, polite company defers to wishes of people even behind their back and doesn't insist on trivializing their deepest insecurities once they're out of earshot, or being able to call someone the n-word when they're not there. > particularly characteristics that gave someone an advantage Do you think being deeply uncomfortable with your birth-assigned gender and wanting to be called "he" gives you a big advantage? (Please don't bring up the sports thing, because it's not what we're talking about and that's a completely different kettle of fish).
- captainmuon 4y ago
  Detecting black faces correctly is one thing; obviously if a system can't do that it's an issue and it shows that the people making the system were biased. But something like Copilot or DALL-E? If you ask DALL-E for a doctor and it rarely shows black people (or women), then it is neither racist nor broken. Our society is broken. There are not enough people in that job that are not white and male. Or they are not represented enough. I think there is value in AI that honestly reflects society, because it makes this discrepancy harder to ignore. People imagined AI would be this benevolent, neutral, wise thing that would maybe be a bit naive but not have our human biases. But it turns out there is no "morally neutral". It will just reflect what you put into it.
  - mlyle 4y ago
    > There are not enough people in that job that are not white and male. Have you looked at the actual demographics of medical doctors in the US? 54% are women, and 35% are nonwhite. But when we have media depictions of doctors, I agree they tend to be white and male. So, what should DALL-E conform to? Should it conform to A) our actual present society, B) the biased original dataset (which leans both towards the past and towards existing media biases), or C) some idealized version of society? I got 12 white dudes, one Southeast Asian woman, one Southeast Asian looking man, and two men that I'm not sure of their race when I tried this just now (quite possibly white). This is despite OpenAI's efforts to debias it, and isn't representative of current physician demographics. But if AI just represents and reinforces extant biases-- and worse, AI is used to produce art and text that ends up in other AIs training sets -- how do we ever get out of this mess? The people who produce, publish, and productize AI do have some degree of editorial responsibility. > But it turns out there is no "morally neutral". Of course not. Hume pointed out long ago that you can't transform positive statements into normative ones. But all of this is a little offtopic, anyways. This is about when it's reasonable to refuse to return a result. "Hey, your answer had the N-word in it, and we know most of the time our model does that it's offensive-- so we're just not going to return a result, sorry." I think this is a reasonable path to take when you know that your model has some behaviors that are socially questionable.
    - GameOfFrowns 4y ago
- q-big 4y ago
  > I don't think, e.g. being able to handle black faces correctly is some sort of massive ideological commitment. But tend people tend to insult everybody that does not care so much about such a topic as racist.
nonethewiser 4y ago
> They refer to it as “eliminating bias”, but it’s really just an attempt to mold these new technologies into conformance with one very specific set of ideological commitments. It is quite literally creating bias.
- aaomidi 4y ago
  How is not suggesting stuff related to gender creating bias?
- tablespoon 4y ago
  >> They refer to it as “eliminating bias”, but it’s really just an attempt to mold these new technologies into conformance with one very specific set of ideological commitments. > It is quite literally creating bias. None of the people who do it care. One of the deceptive tactics that's pretty common in contemporary political discourse is to corrupt definitions in order to enforce controversial ideology using anodyne language. >> Proponents view it as some kind of obvious universal good, and are confused when anyone else is appalled by the blind foolishness of it all. IMHO, that "confusion" is an act.
- woojoo666 4y ago
  I believe the idea is that society is prejudiced/biased, so training an AI using data from that society would perpetrate that bias. So there needs to be some manual correction.
  - q-big 4y ago
    > I believe the idea is that society is prejudiced/biased, so training an AI using data from that society would perpetrate that bias. So there needs to be some manual correction. These activists are free to write their own code that conforms to their ideology.
    - npteljes 4y ago
      So what if Microsoft is such an activist? Implying from their tool, which conforms to this ideology.
scarface74 4y ago
So, I have a security camera that triggers when it sees a person or an animal and notifies you of what it thinks it sees. It always detect my tall big Black son as an “animal”. It doesn’t do that for anyone else who comes up to the door.
Traubenfuchs 4y ago
What a horrible time for ML/AI to explode. This is completely unlike the time of usenet and internet wild west. It‘s a whole new world of technology, castrated from the start.

mlyle 4y ago

> They refer to it as “eliminating bias”, I don't think, e.g. being able to handle black faces correctly is some sort of massive ideological commitment. So let's not pretend that the entire concern of bias in AI is irrelevant, no matter where you stand on gender. > conformance with one very specific set of ideological commitments You know-- let's just talk about basic respect and dignity: if someone strongly wants to be referred to in a particular way, the polite response is to respect their wishes. If there's a lot of people in this category, it makes sense for your system to address it. If you instead build your system in a way that you don't achieve this, you're being rude. If you use old training data and refer to people as a "Mongoloid" as a result-- don't be surprised that people are offended. Ditto, if you use old training data about gender that doesn't match many peoples' current expectations.

nonethewiser 4y ago
> I don't think, e.g. being able to handle black faces correctly is some sort of massive ideological commitment. Why did you suggest THIS as an example of what hes talking about? He doesn't indicate that he disagrees with this case. Furthermore,that sounds like a problem of having incomplete training data. Regardless, manually tweaking a model points to a failure in the process somewhere.
- mlyle 4y ago
  > Why did you suggest THIS as an example of what hes talking about? He seems to be pooh-poohing the entire idea of "eliminating bias" in AI. So I felt it was important to * point out that there are clear cases of bias in AI no matter where you stand on gender * move on to explain a closely related case (using historical speech about race could be offensive) * use the lesson to show that using historical speech about gender could be problematic as well > Furthermore,that sounds like a problem of having incomplete training data. Training a model from historical data can only reflect historical approaches. The social conventions around gender are changing rapidly and are contentious. > Regardless, manually tweaking a model points to a failure in the process somewhere. Here, there's no manual tweaking of the model: merely a refusal to return results in an area where the model has proven problematic.
  - nonethewiser 4y ago
    I don't think your example is indicative of what he opposed. If you can't effectively train something from existing data then cherry picking results according to different values isnt going to fix it. Your example has quietly shifted from facial recognition of different races to speech about different races. I cant even be sure of what you're talking about other than the fact that you will oppose criticism of imparting political bias into models.
    - magicalist 4y ago
      > If you can't effectively train something from existing data then cherry picking results according to different values isnt going to fix it. Given the variance in the utility of copilot's suggestions, this doesn't seem true on it's face. Define "effectively" here and I think cherry picking would definitely fall within its range.
    - mlyle 4y ago
      > then cherry picking results according to different values isnt going to fix it. Again: "merely a refusal to return results in an area where the model has proven problematic." > Your example has quietly shifted from facial recognition of different races to speech about different races. Again, three points: * First, no matter how you feel about gender: bias in AI is a problem, as evidenced by issues with recognizing black faces. * Second, there's some obvious cases where we can all agree that using past training data could result in things that are currently offensive. There are pieces of language we pretty much all agree we should use differently now to avoid offense (e.g. mongoloid). * Third, I believe that gender is one of these cases. Social mores are evolving. Using conventions from the past when our collective norms are changing on the span of months basically guarantees offense.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
davoneus 4y ago
I call complete and utter BS. This is in no way different than disabling a word procesors autocorrect when a writer uses the term gender in their novel. The programmer should be able to use whatever the hell terms they want to use in their program. If the customer base doesn't like it that's their right. But it's not the right of the damn language parser programmer.
- mlyle 4y ago
  > But it's not the right of the damn language parser programmer. This isn't a language parser. This is a tool that suggests implementations of small portions of code. If the training data is out of date, it's quite reasonable for people employing that model to decide it shouldn't return results based on the out-of-date training data. Even about completely different things. If the output is C code containing gets(), maybe we should decline to return the result. > he programmer should be able to use whatever the hell terms they want to use in their program. Indeed, it leaves it completely up to the programmer by refusing to suggest an implementation that would favor either side of the debate.
  - GameOfFrowns 4y ago
    >If the training data is out of date, it's quite reasonable for people employing that model to decide it shouldn't return results based on the out-of-date training data. It's not "out-of-date". That's just the kind of pilpul semantic framing that these activists engage in since "out-of-date" implies "bad". The data is just not in line with their artificially made-up ideology. A demand which one, even as the best "ally" in the world, could never satisfy anyway, since the grievance grifting relies on always coming up with new issues, you just have to look at the shift from "equality" to "equity" or from "microaggressions" to "nanoaggressions"
    - mlyle 4y ago
      All social conventions are artificially made-up ideology. If you insist on calling a black person a "negro", despite its change in connotation over time, you are not being very nice. If you train an AI, or a person, using old books to call someone a "negro", you're condoning and continuing offensive behavior. Ditto, here. > since the grievance grifting relies on always coming up with new issues, We pretty clearly, culturally, have a whole lot of issues. Becoming more nuanced in how we label them makes sense. And, of course, language changes rapidly. It especially changes rapidly when we're talking about marginalized groups. Pejoration is a process by which a word associated with marginalized groups become offensive over time. "Idiot", "moron", "retard" were all originally clinical and relatively non-offensive words, but society as a whole ended up changing them to include a value judgment. The euphemism treadmill is annoying, but insisting on continuing to call someone something that has developed a negative value judgment is not really good, either.
agileAlligator 4y ago
> if someone strongly wants to be referred to in a particular way, the polite response is to respect their wishes Would you also respect the wishes of a schizophrenic person, if they say much the same thing? If they say that they are actually an alien from outer space, would you play along?
- aaomidi 4y ago
  So how and why do you jump to this extreme?
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- magicalist 4y ago
  For 95+% of people I interact with in a given day, it's none of my business and not at all my job to police whether a person is asking me to call them by their "real" name or whatever it is your questions are trying to get at.
- mlyle 4y ago
  > Would you also respect the wishes of a schizophrenic person, if they say much the same thing? In general, I would respect someone's wishes. If they want to be Mork from outer space, K. Of course, there are some very limited cases where we may reasonably believe that playing along is harmful either to ourselves or to the other person. If there's a broad medical consensus that something is harmful to someone, then maybe we shouldn't do it. A biologically female person who wants to be called "they," because they have decided they don't like the connotations attached to "she" right now, doesn't rise anywhere close to that in my opinion.
lmm 4y ago
- mlyle 4y ago
  > Removing your face-recognition function because it's less effective on black faces is certainly a substantial ideological commitment. Deploying your face-recognition function for something critical that impacts user quality of life, even if it doesn't recognize black faces well, is an ideological commitment by default. > That's not generally true. It's absolutely generally true. We generally call people by the name they request; if they don't like us referring to their race or features in a certain way, we stop. > We don't give noble or professional titles Are you suggesting that having a naturally born penis is some kind of equivalent signifier to being a P.Eng? > focused on the feelings of some very small groups I think you are underestimating how big of a change is afoot in the 13-25 demographic.
  - lmm 4y ago
    - mlyle 4y ago
      > In terms of how much difference it makes to someone going to dinner with them in a casual social context? Yes, it probably is. Anyone can date whomever they want based on whatever criteria they want. But if someone wants to be called "he" despite not being born with a penis-- what's the big deal? Are you being harmed so much by complying? > > if they don't like us referring to their race or features in a certain way, we stop. > Maybe to their face. Well, here we're talking about the code we're writing that will presumably be telling them "to their face" in some context. And, polite company defers to wishes of people even behind their back and doesn't insist on trivializing their deepest insecurities once they're out of earshot, or being able to call someone the n-word when they're not there. > particularly characteristics that gave someone an advantage Do you think being deeply uncomfortable with your birth-assigned gender and wanting to be called "he" gives you a big advantage? (Please don't bring up the sports thing, because it's not what we're talking about and that's a completely different kettle of fish).
captainmuon 4y ago
Detecting black faces correctly is one thing; obviously if a system can't do that it's an issue and it shows that the people making the system were biased. But something like Copilot or DALL-E? If you ask DALL-E for a doctor and it rarely shows black people (or women), then it is neither racist nor broken. Our society is broken. There are not enough people in that job that are not white and male. Or they are not represented enough. I think there is value in AI that honestly reflects society, because it makes this discrepancy harder to ignore. People imagined AI would be this benevolent, neutral, wise thing that would maybe be a bit naive but not have our human biases. But it turns out there is no "morally neutral". It will just reflect what you put into it.
- mlyle 4y ago
  > There are not enough people in that job that are not white and male. Have you looked at the actual demographics of medical doctors in the US? 54% are women, and 35% are nonwhite. But when we have media depictions of doctors, I agree they tend to be white and male. So, what should DALL-E conform to? Should it conform to A) our actual present society, B) the biased original dataset (which leans both towards the past and towards existing media biases), or C) some idealized version of society? I got 12 white dudes, one Southeast Asian woman, one Southeast Asian looking man, and two men that I'm not sure of their race when I tried this just now (quite possibly white). This is despite OpenAI's efforts to debias it, and isn't representative of current physician demographics. But if AI just represents and reinforces extant biases-- and worse, AI is used to produce art and text that ends up in other AIs training sets -- how do we ever get out of this mess? The people who produce, publish, and productize AI do have some degree of editorial responsibility. > But it turns out there is no "morally neutral". Of course not. Hume pointed out long ago that you can't transform positive statements into normative ones. But all of this is a little offtopic, anyways. This is about when it's reasonable to refuse to return a result. "Hey, your answer had the N-word in it, and we know most of the time our model does that it's offensive-- so we're just not going to return a result, sorry." I think this is a reasonable path to take when you know that your model has some behaviors that are socially questionable.
  - GameOfFrowns 4y ago
q-big 4y ago
> I don't think, e.g. being able to handle black faces correctly is some sort of massive ideological commitment. But tend people tend to insult everybody that does not care so much about such a topic as racist.

nonethewiser 4y ago

> They refer to it as “eliminating bias”, but it’s really just an attempt to mold these new technologies into conformance with one very specific set of ideological commitments. It is quite literally creating bias.

aaomidi 4y ago
How is not suggesting stuff related to gender creating bias?
tablespoon 4y ago
>> They refer to it as “eliminating bias”, but it’s really just an attempt to mold these new technologies into conformance with one very specific set of ideological commitments. > It is quite literally creating bias. None of the people who do it care. One of the deceptive tactics that's pretty common in contemporary political discourse is to corrupt definitions in order to enforce controversial ideology using anodyne language. >> Proponents view it as some kind of obvious universal good, and are confused when anyone else is appalled by the blind foolishness of it all. IMHO, that "confusion" is an act.
woojoo666 4y ago
I believe the idea is that society is prejudiced/biased, so training an AI using data from that society would perpetrate that bias. So there needs to be some manual correction.
- q-big 4y ago
  > I believe the idea is that society is prejudiced/biased, so training an AI using data from that society would perpetrate that bias. So there needs to be some manual correction. These activists are free to write their own code that conforms to their ideology.
  - npteljes 4y ago
    So what if Microsoft is such an activist? Implying from their tool, which conforms to this ideology.

scarface74 4y ago

So, I have a security camera that triggers when it sees a person or an animal and notifies you of what it thinks it sees. It always detect my tall big Black son as an “animal”. It doesn’t do that for anyone else who comes up to the door.

Traubenfuchs 4y ago

What a horrible time for ML/AI to explode. This is completely unlike the time of usenet and internet wild west. It‘s a whole new world of technology, castrated from the start.