3 ms·

I'm as sick of AI nonsense as anyone and I'm a chronic Mozilla critic (I mostly wish they'd just accept my donations for Firefox and focus exclusively on that).

I'm as sick of AI nonsense as anyone and I'm a chronic Mozilla critic (I mostly wish they'd just accept my donations for Firefox and focus exclusively on that). That said, this post is over the top. If you read the blog post it's pretty obvious what happened. Someone at Mozilla.ai had an extra day on their hands and ran a bunch of text they'd collected through a few models. They thought "hey, this is kind of cool, let's make a blog post about it". Then they wrote one stupid line about their motivations (likely made up to justify playing around with local models) and get completely lambasted for that one stupid line. I'd rather live in a world where people are comfortable throwing together a quick blog post detailing a fun/stupid project they did than one in which they do that anyway but are hesitant to share because people will rake them over the coals for being "unserious".

zem 2y ago
> Then they wrote one stupid line about their motivations (likely made up to justify playing around with local models) and get completely lambasted for that one stupid line. to be fair, it's worth lambasting them over it because they are perpetuating the myth that AI is bias free (which a lot of people actually do believe!) and putting the weight of mozilla's reputation behind it
- Cacti 2y ago
  thanks but my reputation already has a colorway
- Legend2440 2y ago
  On the flip side: A lot of claims of AI bias are overblown and/or straight-up disingenuous. Remember when ProPublica claimed that recidivism prediction models were biased against black people? (https://www.propublica.org/article/how-we-analyzed-the-compas-recidivism-algorithm https://www.propublica.org/article/how-we-analyzed-the-compa...) They rigged their analysis. There are two different fairness metrics - individual and group-based - that cannot possibly be fulfilled at the same time if there is any difference between the groups. (https://arxiv.org/abs/1609.05807v2 https://arxiv.org/abs/1609.05807v2) The model was fair all along according to individual metrics. ProPublica picked their fairness metric so as to make the model appear biased. The whole thing was a lie.
  - tbrownaw 2y ago
    > On the flip side: A lot of claims of AI bias are overblown and/or straight-up disingenuous. The same is true regarding humans though, so "use a magic ai to avoid bias from humans" still doesn't make any sense.
- ertian 2y ago
  Yeah, I think the only real problem with this is that it was posted under the auspices of Mozilla's official foundation. If it was a personal blog post, it'd be just fine.
tbrownaw 2y ago
> If you read the blog post it's pretty obvious what happened. Someone at Mozilla.ai had an extra day on their hands and ran a bunch of text they'd collected through a few models. That's certainly a possibility, but the post sure looks like it's trying to claim otherwise.
rendaw 2y ago
By going on the official blog Mozilla is putting their reputation behind it, be it one person or a team.
gepardi 2y ago
Agreed. Not sure why author is so enraged.

zem 2y ago

> Then they wrote one stupid line about their motivations (likely made up to justify playing around with local models) and get completely lambasted for that one stupid line. to be fair, it's worth lambasting them over it because they are perpetuating the myth that AI is bias free (which a lot of people actually do believe!) and putting the weight of mozilla's reputation behind it

Cacti 2y ago
thanks but my reputation already has a colorway
Legend2440 2y ago
On the flip side: A lot of claims of AI bias are overblown and/or straight-up disingenuous. Remember when ProPublica claimed that recidivism prediction models were biased against black people? (https://www.propublica.org/article/how-we-analyzed-the-compas-recidivism-algorithm https://www.propublica.org/article/how-we-analyzed-the-compa...) They rigged their analysis. There are two different fairness metrics - individual and group-based - that cannot possibly be fulfilled at the same time if there is any difference between the groups. (https://arxiv.org/abs/1609.05807v2 https://arxiv.org/abs/1609.05807v2) The model was fair all along according to individual metrics. ProPublica picked their fairness metric so as to make the model appear biased. The whole thing was a lie.
- tbrownaw 2y ago
  > On the flip side: A lot of claims of AI bias are overblown and/or straight-up disingenuous. The same is true regarding humans though, so "use a magic ai to avoid bias from humans" still doesn't make any sense.
ertian 2y ago
Yeah, I think the only real problem with this is that it was posted under the auspices of Mozilla's official foundation. If it was a personal blog post, it'd be just fine.

tbrownaw 2y ago

> If you read the blog post it's pretty obvious what happened. Someone at Mozilla.ai had an extra day on their hands and ran a bunch of text they'd collected through a few models. That's certainly a possibility, but the post sure looks like it's trying to claim otherwise.

rendaw 2y ago

By going on the official blog Mozilla is putting their reputation behind it, be it one person or a team.

gepardi 2y ago

Agreed. Not sure why author is so enraged.