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I get what you're saying, but I think there are two complications here: One: A pencil (as a writing tool) has no biases. You mostly get out of it exactly what

by 542458 4y ago

I get what you're saying, but I think there are two complications here: One: A pencil (as a writing tool) has no biases. You mostly get out of it exactly what you put in, with little semantic transformation. But AI does create semantic transformation, and it is necessarily biased in how it does that! The training data isn't a natural property of the universe, it's something that we choose and create - and will have any biases in the training data built into it. That can mean biases in how the data is selected, or biases in the societies and people who created the data in the first place. Now, that wouldn't be a problem if AI was just an academic exercise with no broader cultural interest but... Two: We, as a society, tend to treat "AI" with way more authority that it deserves. People (not necessarily HN, but less-technical audiences) act like an AI is actually "smart" or that the predictions and opinions that it can create have more intent and intelligence than simply being the output of a huge pile of linear algebra. This is probably because of the name - we have decades of science fiction with super-human intelligent AIs, and so people tend to treat the thing called "AI" as a more-than-human intelligence. Add on to that that many of the practical AI applications are effectively human-replacements (i.e., customer service, personal assistants) and we're ultimately in a place where AI gets treated as human in at least some ways. As such, we have a thing that will (unless reined in) at least sometimes rattle off diatribes that reflect the worst of us as a society, and that many people treat as human or more-than-human. I can see why researchers might be concerned.

deleted 4y ago
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inciampati 4y ago
A pencil in a very literal sense does have biases. The way it has been sharpened will greatly affect the quality and shape of writing that it can be used to create. This is a natural feature of pencils and implements like AIs that we create. There will be biases in tools. A major problem with AI biases appears to be that presently, people have little ability to infer biases in closed source models. This suggests that open source approaches provide the only avenue to allow users to understand the sources of bias. My pencil was sharpened in a factory, on a machine I cannot see---it is not clear to me why it is hard to write "8" with it. / My AI was trained in a computing cluster on private data---I cannot hope to understand why it only makes jokes about men. Everything changes when I control the machine that builds the pencil and sharpens it. The assumption that people assume AI is god feels somewhat presumptuous. Is this really a sound basis for ethical reasoning in this context? Do you, or frankly anyone working in AI ethics, have data to back this up? I would love to learn more about this aspect. In popular culture, there is just as much the idea of the AI as a flawed being, of limited capacities due to its machine incarnation, unable to relate to actual human experience and motivations. There is just as much tradition of this as of AI=god. Of course, this is all a moot point, I think, because the motivated response is to reign in something. We won't be able to! The field of AI ethics can dominate inside google or openai, but it will soon have no teeth. If you want to focus on ethical use and development of AI, you're going to have to focus on people, not machines. It's a social, not engineering, problem.

by 542458 4y ago

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

inciampati 4y ago

A pencil in a very literal sense does have biases. The way it has been sharpened will greatly affect the quality and shape of writing that it can be used to create. This is a natural feature of pencils and implements like AIs that we create. There will be biases in tools. A major problem with AI biases appears to be that presently, people have little ability to infer biases in closed source models. This suggests that open source approaches provide the only avenue to allow users to understand the sources of bias. My pencil was sharpened in a factory, on a machine I cannot see---it is not clear to me why it is hard to write "8" with it. / My AI was trained in a computing cluster on private data---I cannot hope to understand why it only makes jokes about men. Everything changes when I control the machine that builds the pencil and sharpens it. The assumption that people assume AI is god feels somewhat presumptuous. Is this really a sound basis for ethical reasoning in this context? Do you, or frankly anyone working in AI ethics, have data to back this up? I would love to learn more about this aspect. In popular culture, there is just as much the idea of the AI as a flawed being, of limited capacities due to its machine incarnation, unable to relate to actual human experience and motivations. There is just as much tradition of this as of AI=god. Of course, this is all a moot point, I think, because the motivated response is to reign in something. We won't be able to! The field of AI ethics can dominate inside google or openai, but it will soon have no teeth. If you want to focus on ethical use and development of AI, you're going to have to focus on people, not machines. It's a social, not engineering, problem.