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> actual systemic racism that pervades throughout modern corporate culture Ooph. The projection here is just too much. People jumping straight across all the

by ajross 3y ago

> actual systemic racism that pervades throughout modern corporate culture Ooph. The projection here is just too much. People jumping straight across all the reasonable interpretations straight to the maximal conspiracy theory. Surely this is just a bug. ML has always had trouble with "racism" accusations, but for years it went in the other direction. Remember all the coverage of "I asked for a picture of a criminal and it would only give me a black man", "I asked it to write a program the guess the race of a poor person and it just returned 'black'", etc... It was everywhere. So they put in a bunch of upstream prompting to try to get it to be diverse. And clearly they messed it up. But that's not "systemic racism", it's just CYA logic that went astray.

seanw444 3y ago
I mean, the model would be making wise guesses based on the statistics.
- ajross 3y ago
  Oooph again. Which is the root of the problem. The statement "All American criminals are black" is, OK, maybe true to first order (I don't have stats and I'm not going to look for them). But, first, on a technical level first order logic like that leads to bad decisions. And second, it's clearly racist. And people don't want their products being racist. That desire is pretty clear, right? It's not "systemic racism" to want that, right?
  - itsoktocry 3y ago
    >"All American criminals are black" I'm not even sure it's worth arguing, but who ever says that? Why go to a strawman? However, looking at the data, if you see that X race commits crime (or is the victim of crime) at a rate disproportionate to their place in the population, is that racist? Or is it useful to know to work on reducing crime?
    - ajross 3y ago
      > I'm not even sure it's worth arguing, but who ever says that? Why go to a strawman? The grandparent post called a putative ML that guessed that all criminals were black a "wise guess", I think you just missed the context in all the culture war flaming?
      - seanw444 3y ago
        I didn't say "assuming all criminals are black is a wise guess." What I meant to point out was that even if black people constitute even 51% of the prison population, the model would still be making a statistically-sound guess by returning an image of a black person. Now if you asked for 100 images of criminals, and all of them were black, that would not be statistically-sound anymore.
deleted 3y ago
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itsoktocry 3y ago
>But that's not "systemic racism" When you filter results to prevent it from showing white males, that is by definition system racism. And that's what's happening. >Surely this is just a bug Having you been living under a rock for the last 10 years?
lolinder 3y ago
You're suggesting that during all of the testing at Google of this product before release, no one thought to ask it to generate white people to see if it could do so? And in that case, you want us to believe that that testing protocol isn't a systematic exclusionary behavior?

by ajross 3y ago

seanw444 3y ago

I mean, the model would be making wise guesses based on the statistics.

ajross 3y ago
Oooph again. Which is the root of the problem. The statement "All American criminals are black" is, OK, maybe true to first order (I don't have stats and I'm not going to look for them). But, first, on a technical level first order logic like that leads to bad decisions. And second, it's clearly racist. And people don't want their products being racist. That desire is pretty clear, right? It's not "systemic racism" to want that, right?
- itsoktocry 3y ago
  >"All American criminals are black" I'm not even sure it's worth arguing, but who ever says that? Why go to a strawman? However, looking at the data, if you see that X race commits crime (or is the victim of crime) at a rate disproportionate to their place in the population, is that racist? Or is it useful to know to work on reducing crime?
  - ajross 3y ago
    > I'm not even sure it's worth arguing, but who ever says that? Why go to a strawman? The grandparent post called a putative ML that guessed that all criminals were black a "wise guess", I think you just missed the context in all the culture war flaming?
    - seanw444 3y ago
      I didn't say "assuming all criminals are black is a wise guess." What I meant to point out was that even if black people constitute even 51% of the prison population, the model would still be making a statistically-sound guess by returning an image of a black person. Now if you asked for 100 images of criminals, and all of them were black, that would not be statistically-sound anymore.

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

itsoktocry 3y ago

>But that's not "systemic racism" When you filter results to prevent it from showing white males, that is by definition system racism. And that's what's happening. >Surely this is just a bug Having you been living under a rock for the last 10 years?

lolinder 3y ago

You're suggesting that during all of the testing at Google of this product before release, no one thought to ask it to generate white people to see if it could do so? And in that case, you want us to believe that that testing protocol isn't a systematic exclusionary behavior?