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When are we going to get tired of journalists of middling intelligence speaking as if there's something profound about identifying bias? These stories just are
by ravenstine 3y ago
When are we going to get tired of journalists of middling intelligence speaking as if there's something profound about identifying bias? These stories just aren't useful. Every system has some form of bias, more or less, and a system that has less of a functional bias than another system isn't necessarily a better one. A system might be made to be relatively "unbiased", yet be useless to most people as a result. At worst, civilization continues to coerce humans into servitude of menial tasks rather than free up everyone's time if we decide that systems that are biased or aren't God-level perfect are considered harmful.
- vkou 3y agoAbout the time when SWEs with a middling grasp of perspective of the consequences of their actions stop handwaving away all criticism of their work. (Is there some kind of universal law that you're citing, that claims that it's impossible to build a useful, unbiased system?) Edit: Oh, right, this goes right into a rant about how women choose to not engage. There are no additional barriers that we put in front of them, I'm sure...
- ravenstine 3y ago> Edit: Oh, right, this goes right into a rant about how women choose to not engage. There are no additional barriers that we put in front of them, I'm sure... I removed what I added there because I realized it was a distraction from the primary point I was making. And I'm glad I did, because your response reminds me of how so few people take the time to understand what others are saying in explicit language. I'm not trying to be rude, but things like this are upsetting. Not once did I say that there are "no additional barriers", and I even said explicitly that there are.
- polski-g 3y agoIf journalists are unhappy with the output of a private SWE labor, they can learn to code and generate a product to match their exact specifications.
- vkou 3y agoIf SWEs are unhappy with journalists writing about them, they can learn to write, start a newspaper, reach a few million readers, and publish their own investigative stories/op-eds that will match their exact specifications and agendas.
- randomopining 3y agoIronically most journalists have a job BECAUSE of bias. Otherwise there would be just 1 news source kinda like Reuters, reporting completely unbiased factual events about the world and that's it.
- _Nat_ 3y ago> (Is there some kind of universal law that you're citing, that claims that it's impossible to build a useful, unbiased system?) Usually it'd be a trade-off, where you'd give up some quality at doing the main job to gain whatever the secondary objective would be, e.g. producing results according to whatever desired distribution. That said, the bigger issue would be defining what "unbiased" means. There're some mutually-exclusive notions of what it'd take to be unbiased, so if "unbiased" requires not being biased according to any perspective, then, yeah, it wouldn't generally be possible. For a quick example, say that we want to be unbiased in our representation of men-vs.-women in a profession. Then, is the proper ratio: (1) 50% men and 50% women; (2) population-weighted ratios (because men and women aren't generally equally represented in the population); (3) profession-weighted ratios (because men and women aren't generally equally represented in a profession); (4) observer-subjective ratio (this is, a realistic ratio for how often a viewer might actually see men-vs.-women of that profession); (5) something else? What about intersexed people -- should they be represented, and if so, at what ratio, and how should men/women be adjusted to account for them? Then, what if the photo would be served by having a person of a certain height, to best fill the space while not covering up more -- then, should the algorithm be biased toward a man or a woman based on typical heights, to accurately represent sex-specific height-distributions? Or, should it deviate from that, and present men and women as having the same height-distribution? And if we do deviate from that to pretend that men and women have the same height-distribution, but that height-distribution more closely matches the actual height-distribution for one sex than the other, then is that itself a form of bias? Then, same as above, but for weight. Then for body size. Then, what if men and women have different fashions in the relevant culture, and one fashion would better fit the scene -- can that be a factor? And if so, what should be the logic for picking the relevant culture? Then, how should interactions be handled? For example, if we're generating pictures of doctors who're also mothers, then should men be included in that, or is it okay to only have female doctors in that context? Or what if we're generating pictures of doctors at a conference for female doctors in specific but has some male attendees -- then what ratio would be correct? Point being that, for someone designing algorithms that would be "unbiased", they'd presumably want to know what folks would accept as a valid solution to that objective. Without a clear definition of what's desired, it'd seem like any particular solution would be open to criticism from other perspectives.
- 90-00-09 3y agoWhat are the consequences of biases in Stable Diffusion?