Artificial Intelligence’s White Guy Problem

SporkTornado · 2016-06-26T17:48:02+00:00

Take a small example from last year: Users discovered that Google’s photo app, which applies automatic labels to pictures in digital photo albums, was classifying images of black people as gorillas. Google apologized; it was unintentional.

Does anyone remember when google streetview's automatic face censoring program was blurring out hubcaps because it got them mixed up with human faces?

fengpi · 2016-06-26T18:01:49+00:00

All artificial intellgiences will be racist, sexist and will oppress women. Especially the white ones in college.

Arby01 · 2016-06-26T18:20:45+00:00

wtf? Worrying about the singularity, a development of a super-intelligence that could very well spell the end of humanity, is distracting from whether current cameras are able to accurately recognize all skin tones?

This writer, while pointing out a very valid problem that does need to be addressed, has made an absolutely moronic comparison and needs to go back to writing school.

explainingtheproblem · 2016-06-27T05:02:46+00:00

I'm a white guy who works in the industry, and I want to explain the problem a little better. It says the reasons are "unknown" but it's actually pretty simple: it's just biases in the training data, reflecting biases in human society.

First off, the examples the article leads with are pretty trivial. I mean it thinks Asian people are blinking, OK, not a big deal.

But suppose it's doing something important like predicting risk of recidivism (explained in the article), or deciding who to approve or deny for a loan, or who's resume to reject, or whatever.

It's not that the algorithm is racist or sexist, but it will learn any bias present in the training data. For example, it's been shown that resumes with black sounding names are more likely to be passed over than resumes with white sounding names, all else being equal. So what happens when you take training data where black names are being rejected more often than white names? The algorithm will learn that bias, because by using it, it can make better predictions (based on scoring how well it does against test data which has the same bias).

There are almost certainly gender biases too, and they surely go both ways in different cases (benefiting women and benefiting men). It's just the algorithm reflecting unfairness in human society that manifest in the training data.

RampantAnonymous · 2016-06-27T11:01:32+00:00

The artificial intelligence they talk about here isn't actual intelligence. We're many years away from making computers that have the learning capacity of dogs, none the less humans.

The 'intelligence' used in programs like crime data analyzers and advertising software isn't intelligence, it's just a bunch of filters set by some dude- switches essentially. So it's going to carry all the prejudices of whoever set all the switches. It's really not much more complex than some guy setting a bunch of tabs to "BLACK GUY 20% CRIME GOOD" and such. If the people who use it are biased, then data that comes is biased.

The algorithm overwhelming used in these kinds of big data tools is Baynesian filtering. It's not so much intelligent as it is like a pachinko machine- it flips a bunch of switches as data falls through it, and then the coins hopefully end up in the correct slots. So garbage in, garbage out.

Our currently used commercial data analysis systems are fundamentally not so different from an actual series of tubes. I think only the most cutting edge and secretive technologies like WATSON or Google search are actually employing neural nets and stuff actually that could be reasonably called intelligence. True intelligence involves observing the world around you and gathering additional information. It's not just looking at whatever's shoved and tagged in front of you according to one (or multiple assigned) methodology.

2016-06-26T18:27:35+00:00

"Seriously, if you are pundit needing to write a piece explaining Trump or Brexit or whatever, consider what a normal human reaction would be to the kind of Mindless White Guy Hate, as seen in this op-ed, that is utterly respectable in the prestige press."

Title	Artificial Intelligence’s White Guy Problem
Author	eaton80
Upvotes	5
Comments	8
Date	June 26, 2016 5:30 PM UTC (10 years ago)
Subreddit	Posted in /r/MensRights
Original Link	https://old.reddit.com/r/MensRights/comments/4pyr1f/artificial_intelligences_white_guy_problem/
Archive Link	https://theredarchive.com/r/MensRights/artificial-intelligences-white-guy-problem.946616 https://theredarchive.com/post/946616

Comments