5 ms·

So what you're really saying is, it's perfectly okay for AI to have negative preconceptions and concrete impacts to certain groups of people, as long as it agre

So what you're really saying is, it's perfectly okay for AI to have negative preconceptions and concrete impacts to certain groups of people, as long as it agrees with you on which groups are bad. How would you feel about AI models that classify all modern white people as racists based on overwhelming historical data about slavery, the KKK, etc.? Hey man, data doesn't lie.

zmgsabst 4y ago
Isn’t the media doing exactly that? They fixate on white racists while ignoring (eg) the Christmas parade attack — leading to society developing a bias in their beliefs about racism. I always take these criticism of AI as confession-through-projection of the misdeeds people have engaged in already.
- gcanyon 4y ago
  I'm gonna need a cite and some statistical analysis to back up your "media is biased" claim. One data point on an event that I easily found reporting on isn't going to cut it.
  - zmgsabst 4y ago
    Will FBI crime statistics do? > In 2019, race was reported for 6,406 known hate crime offenders. Of these offenders: > 52.5 percent were White. > 23.9 percent were Black or African American. https://ucr.fbi.gov/hate-crime/2019/topic-pages/offenders https://ucr.fbi.gov/hate-crime/2019/topic-pages/offenders White people don’t commit disproportionately many hate crimes — black people do. According to the FBI.
    - p0pcult 4y ago
      You failed to show evidence that the media is claiming that white people disproportionately commit hate crime.
      - gcanyon 4y ago
        Thanks, your point exactly. My subjective and N=1 opinion is that whites are dramatically under-reported as criminals in the media.
- diputsmonro 4y ago
  Your deflection about the media is entirely unrelated to AI, but it only backs up my argument. If giant media corporations are biased, why can't AI researchers be? Every institution has biases, and blindly trusting a dataset from e.g. a police department is just as bad as blindly trusting data from CNN or Fox News. The collection, aggregation, and sharing of data is a biased operation. If a political or for-profit entity gives you data, it's going to be data that supports their agenda. It takes active, conscious effort to combat that bias, in the same way that it takes active, conscious effort to not just get all your news from one source. The concern (which has been demonstrated) is that that isn't being done
  - zmgsabst 4y ago
    I don’t think it’s unrelated: I often see that argument made in bad faith, eg when someone who believes conclusions from biased data encounters AIs making data driven conclusions, more than I do when the AI is genuinely biased. I also have trouble taking it seriously, since that same standard isn’t applied to existing information services (eg, “media ethics” posts condemning their open racism) — only to new information services which might disrupt the current social order. I should have stated that more directly — but I view these concerns largely as after the fact ethical nits from people whose comfortable myths are confronted by data, projecting their own manipulative behavior onto others.
    - diputsmonro 4y ago
      AI is a developing technology that stands to be used by powerful businesses and governments for all manner of purposes that will likely drastically impact our lives. It's important to criticize what could become the next industrial revolution, and make sure we can get rid of as many systemic issues as possible before they become too big to fix. And many people do criticise the biases of legacy media groups on both sides. But this is an article about AI on a site that is generally more concerned with technical innovations than societal issues, so AI is being criticized. Besides, bad things existing now isn't really a good argument for why we shouldn't prevent bad things from happening in the future.

zmgsabst 4y ago

Isn’t the media doing exactly that? They fixate on white racists while ignoring (eg) the Christmas parade attack — leading to society developing a bias in their beliefs about racism. I always take these criticism of AI as confession-through-projection of the misdeeds people have engaged in already.

gcanyon 4y ago
I'm gonna need a cite and some statistical analysis to back up your "media is biased" claim. One data point on an event that I easily found reporting on isn't going to cut it.
- zmgsabst 4y ago
  Will FBI crime statistics do? > In 2019, race was reported for 6,406 known hate crime offenders. Of these offenders: > 52.5 percent were White. > 23.9 percent were Black or African American. https://ucr.fbi.gov/hate-crime/2019/topic-pages/offenders https://ucr.fbi.gov/hate-crime/2019/topic-pages/offenders White people don’t commit disproportionately many hate crimes — black people do. According to the FBI.
  - p0pcult 4y ago
    You failed to show evidence that the media is claiming that white people disproportionately commit hate crime.
    - gcanyon 4y ago
      Thanks, your point exactly. My subjective and N=1 opinion is that whites are dramatically under-reported as criminals in the media.
diputsmonro 4y ago
Your deflection about the media is entirely unrelated to AI, but it only backs up my argument. If giant media corporations are biased, why can't AI researchers be? Every institution has biases, and blindly trusting a dataset from e.g. a police department is just as bad as blindly trusting data from CNN or Fox News. The collection, aggregation, and sharing of data is a biased operation. If a political or for-profit entity gives you data, it's going to be data that supports their agenda. It takes active, conscious effort to combat that bias, in the same way that it takes active, conscious effort to not just get all your news from one source. The concern (which has been demonstrated) is that that isn't being done
- zmgsabst 4y ago
  I don’t think it’s unrelated: I often see that argument made in bad faith, eg when someone who believes conclusions from biased data encounters AIs making data driven conclusions, more than I do when the AI is genuinely biased. I also have trouble taking it seriously, since that same standard isn’t applied to existing information services (eg, “media ethics” posts condemning their open racism) — only to new information services which might disrupt the current social order. I should have stated that more directly — but I view these concerns largely as after the fact ethical nits from people whose comfortable myths are confronted by data, projecting their own manipulative behavior onto others.
  - diputsmonro 4y ago
    AI is a developing technology that stands to be used by powerful businesses and governments for all manner of purposes that will likely drastically impact our lives. It's important to criticize what could become the next industrial revolution, and make sure we can get rid of as many systemic issues as possible before they become too big to fix. And many people do criticise the biases of legacy media groups on both sides. But this is an article about AI on a site that is generally more concerned with technical innovations than societal issues, so AI is being criticized. Besides, bad things existing now isn't really a good argument for why we shouldn't prevent bad things from happening in the future.