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These kinds of philosophy discussions are frustratingly restricted to bias against minorities. Nobody here commented on the "AI should protect your privacy" te

These kinds of philosophy discussions are frustratingly restricted to bias against minorities. Nobody here commented on the "AI should protect your privacy" tenant with "but how do we know privacy is good? What if my definition of privacy is different from yours? What happens when a criminal has privacy?" Nobody wanted a concrete definition of agency from first principles, nobody wanted to talk about the intersection of agency and telos. "There's no universal truth" is basically an argument against "responsible" AI in the first place, since there would be no universal truth about what "responsibility" means. Mozilla's statement about responsible AI is inherently biased towards their opinion of what responsibility is. But again, the bias accusations only popped up on that last point. We're all fine with Mozilla having opinions about "good" and "bad" states of the world until it has opinions about treating minorities equitably, then it becomes pressingly important that we have a philosophy discussion.

Avicebron 4y ago
On the contrary, I think saying "there is no universal truth" is a foundation of for those discussions of first principles. I wasn't arguing against "responsible ai", I was replying to someone who made their implicit assumptions clear, even if I agreed with who I was responding to, which I do for the most part, I was trying to dig down to the granularity of their assertions. Because it's easy to make sweeping statements about what's 'good' and 'bad' (but who makes those distinctions in which context is more important than just saying it's one or the other). I didn't bring up anything to do with minorities at all, following my logic, the question is, "which minorities and where?" It's in line with what you say about privacy, "who's privacy, what's their definition of it"
- danShumway 4y ago
  > I wasn't arguing against "responsible ai" That's what I'm saying. The fact that you didn't see "responsible AI" as something to question to the same degree is exactly the point I was making. That you don't realize that "neutrality" doesn't exist in a conversation about responsible AI is the point that sgift's comment was making. There is no purpose to going into a conversation about responsible AI trying to be fully neutral about what good and bad is. The word "responsible" implies that there is such a thing as a good and bad outcome, and that the good outcomes are preferable to the bad ones. But to restate GP's point, any conversation about user agency, privacy, equity, responsiblity, bias, accuracy, etc... all of it assumes an opinionated philosophy about what's good and bad -- and in fact, it is desirable to have those discussions working from the assumption that some things are good and some things are bad. It is impossible for any of that conversation to be neutral, nor should neutrality be a goal -- because a conversation about responsible AI is a conversation about how to influence and create those preferred world states, and how to bias an AI to create those world states. There is no such thing as a "neutral" aligned AI. AI alignment is the process of biasing an AI towards particular responses. ---- And again, I just want to point out, these types of conversations never crop up when we're talking about stuff like user agency and privacy. When I say "people should have privacy", nobody asks me to define ethics from first principles. And I mean, people can say "well, we just want to approach first principles in general, this isn't about minorities" -- but people can also read the thread on this page and they can see that all of this conversation spiraled out of someone complaining that Mozilla was calling out models that reinforced existing biases against minorities. That was the context. There is no sibling thread here where someone complained about the dichotomy between safety and agency. And people can take from that what they want, but it's a pattern on HN.
throwaway322112 4y ago
> We're all fine with Mozilla having opinions about "good" and "bad" states of the world until it has opinions about treating minorities equitably, then it becomes pressingly important that we have a philosophy discussion. It's because that was the only thing on the list that is openly discriminatory. If the intent was truly to avoid unfair bias against people, the mention of marginalized communities would be unnecessary. By definition, avoiding bias should be a goal that does not require considering some people or groups differently than others. The fact one set of groups is called out as being the primary consideration for protection makes it clear that the overriding value here is not to avoid bias universally, but rather to consider bias against "marginalized communities" to be worse than bias against other people. Since the launch of ChatGPT, plenty of conservatives have made bias complaints about it. The framework outlined by Mozilla gives the strong impression that they would consider such complaints to be not as important, or maybe not even a problem at all.
- danShumway 4y ago
  > By definition, avoiding bias should be a goal that does not require considering some people or groups differently than others. This is something that sounds nice on paper, but if you've worked with polling data or AI in general, you should have figured out by now that weighting data and compensating for biases in training sets is an essential part of any training/measuring process. LLMs are not trained on "neutral" data. We can have long, difficult conversations about how to fix that and who to focus on, but the idea that you can just throw data sources at an AI and expect the outcome to be fair is kind of silly. Case in point, you bring up bias against Conservatives -- well if you train an LLM on Reddit, it will have a Liberal bias, period. And I suspect if a company tried to correct that bias or even just identify it, you wouldn't call that unfair. In fact, there would be no way to train an LLM on Reddit and to get rid of a Liberal bias in its answers without systematically trying to correct for that bias during the training process. Neutrality where you just throw the data in and trust the results and deliberately refuse to weight the outputs only works when you're pulling data from neutral sources. And in the real world, that's practically never the case. It's certainly never the case with an LLM.
  - 4y ago
dahwolf 4y ago
Good, because equity is evil, unlike equality.

Avicebron 4y ago

On the contrary, I think saying "there is no universal truth" is a foundation of for those discussions of first principles. I wasn't arguing against "responsible ai", I was replying to someone who made their implicit assumptions clear, even if I agreed with who I was responding to, which I do for the most part, I was trying to dig down to the granularity of their assertions. Because it's easy to make sweeping statements about what's 'good' and 'bad' (but who makes those distinctions in which context is more important than just saying it's one or the other). I didn't bring up anything to do with minorities at all, following my logic, the question is, "which minorities and where?" It's in line with what you say about privacy, "who's privacy, what's their definition of it"

danShumway 4y ago
> I wasn't arguing against "responsible ai" That's what I'm saying. The fact that you didn't see "responsible AI" as something to question to the same degree is exactly the point I was making. That you don't realize that "neutrality" doesn't exist in a conversation about responsible AI is the point that sgift's comment was making. There is no purpose to going into a conversation about responsible AI trying to be fully neutral about what good and bad is. The word "responsible" implies that there is such a thing as a good and bad outcome, and that the good outcomes are preferable to the bad ones. But to restate GP's point, any conversation about user agency, privacy, equity, responsiblity, bias, accuracy, etc... all of it assumes an opinionated philosophy about what's good and bad -- and in fact, it is desirable to have those discussions working from the assumption that some things are good and some things are bad. It is impossible for any of that conversation to be neutral, nor should neutrality be a goal -- because a conversation about responsible AI is a conversation about how to influence and create those preferred world states, and how to bias an AI to create those world states. There is no such thing as a "neutral" aligned AI. AI alignment is the process of biasing an AI towards particular responses. ---- And again, I just want to point out, these types of conversations never crop up when we're talking about stuff like user agency and privacy. When I say "people should have privacy", nobody asks me to define ethics from first principles. And I mean, people can say "well, we just want to approach first principles in general, this isn't about minorities" -- but people can also read the thread on this page and they can see that all of this conversation spiraled out of someone complaining that Mozilla was calling out models that reinforced existing biases against minorities. That was the context. There is no sibling thread here where someone complained about the dichotomy between safety and agency. And people can take from that what they want, but it's a pattern on HN.

throwaway322112 4y ago

> We're all fine with Mozilla having opinions about "good" and "bad" states of the world until it has opinions about treating minorities equitably, then it becomes pressingly important that we have a philosophy discussion. It's because that was the only thing on the list that is openly discriminatory. If the intent was truly to avoid unfair bias against people, the mention of marginalized communities would be unnecessary. By definition, avoiding bias should be a goal that does not require considering some people or groups differently than others. The fact one set of groups is called out as being the primary consideration for protection makes it clear that the overriding value here is not to avoid bias universally, but rather to consider bias against "marginalized communities" to be worse than bias against other people. Since the launch of ChatGPT, plenty of conservatives have made bias complaints about it. The framework outlined by Mozilla gives the strong impression that they would consider such complaints to be not as important, or maybe not even a problem at all.

danShumway 4y ago
> By definition, avoiding bias should be a goal that does not require considering some people or groups differently than others. This is something that sounds nice on paper, but if you've worked with polling data or AI in general, you should have figured out by now that weighting data and compensating for biases in training sets is an essential part of any training/measuring process. LLMs are not trained on "neutral" data. We can have long, difficult conversations about how to fix that and who to focus on, but the idea that you can just throw data sources at an AI and expect the outcome to be fair is kind of silly. Case in point, you bring up bias against Conservatives -- well if you train an LLM on Reddit, it will have a Liberal bias, period. And I suspect if a company tried to correct that bias or even just identify it, you wouldn't call that unfair. In fact, there would be no way to train an LLM on Reddit and to get rid of a Liberal bias in its answers without systematically trying to correct for that bias during the training process. Neutrality where you just throw the data in and trust the results and deliberately refuse to weight the outputs only works when you're pulling data from neutral sources. And in the real world, that's practically never the case. It's certainly never the case with an LLM.
- 4y ago

dahwolf 4y ago

Good, because equity is evil, unlike equality.