Content filters on ML feel so silly. I assume the goal is to avoid bad press? Because the... "attack" would be someone generating offensive material, which they could just write themselves, not to mention I have serious doubts that any filter is going to be a serious barrier.
For images/ video I can see merit, ex: using that nudity inference project on images of children, but text seems particularly pointless.
The point is because sometimes even a perfectly reasonable inference from an ML model would be considered a big mistake due to societal considerations that are unknown to the model.
For example, a couple years ago, there was a big hubbub over a Google Image labeler that labeled a black man and woman as "gorillas". A mistake for sure, but the headlines about the algorithm being "racist" were wrong. The algorithm was certainly incorrect, and it could probably have been argued that one reason it was wrong is that its training set contained fewer black people than white people, but the algorithm was certainly unaware of the historical context around this being a racist description.
Similarly, in the early days of Google driving directions I remember one commenter saying something along the lines of "You can tell that no black engineers work at Google" because it pronounced "Malcolm X Boulevard" as "Malcolm 10 Boulevard". Of course, the vast majority of time you see a lone "X" in a street address it is pronounced "ten".
It's kind of analogous to the "uncanny valley" problem in graphics. When the algorithm gets things mostly right, people think of it as "human-like", and so when it makes a mistake, people attribute human logic to it (it's quite safe to assume that a human labeling a picture of black people as gorillas is racist), as opposed to the plain statistical inferences ML models make.
I think I agree with this to a certain extend. Sometimes AI gets attacked in unfair ways, but also while AI is merely making inferences based on its training data, the fact its training data is racist maters. It maters because it has real impacts even if small. Just like the decision by film manufacturers to optimize for accurate colors for white skin, the people who probably bought most of their film, the people who probably business considerations meant they should optimize for.
The actual racist thing is that humans who don’t consider or prepare for or include affected people in deciding to deploy models trained to produce racist outcomes. It doesn’t matter that the machine has no opinions, it matters that the machine produces outcomes reflecting harmful biases. Banning the word doesn’t change that, but neither does treating the biased process as unbiased.
The models output isnt racist. Racism has intent, the algo doesn't.
It can be wrong or right but it is not making a judgment based on anything outside of math.
You are correct to say the training wasn't complete but that doesn't mean anyone did anything wrong, racist, or hateful... 99% of the time it's simply a mistake.
When you label things like that as racist instead of simply mistakes you water that word down to the point where it becomes meaningless.
The problem in the last 10+ yrs of outrage internet social justice is that in order to gain attention and get traction those involved have lumped so many things into terms like racism that that it eventually becomes so stretched it's meaningless.
This is a failure to understand centuries of history. It’s an understandable one, it’s one I used to relate more to and I probably still relate to it far more than I should.
The notion of racism requiring malice is so far from reality that similar defenses were dismissed almost a century ago in international tribunals which still shape the world.
It takes no malice to participate in racism. It only takes accepting it as given. This doesn’t have anything to do with anything that’s originated from the internet, from any perspective. It doesn’t make racism meaningless. Treating it that way does though.
“The” problem is that racism, as a societal background factor, is treated as the sea in which we swim, it’s “neutral” without an actor present to promote it. If it just “is”, no one is “at fault” and… the kicker, if your definition requires intent and there isn’t any intent for the specifics under question… it’s not just a mistake, it has defenses like these to shield and bolster it.
You can rail against “social justice” all you like, and I’m betting my response will show your railing resonates more here than it should. But your position is ahistorical and probably based in defensiveness about something you don’t need to defend.
I didn't say racism requires malice - I said it required intent, most of the time that intent is malice but not always. The current pop culture version of racism isn't often racism, it's prejudice or stereotyping or most often simply ignorance.
Two people can make the exact same remark and one can be racist and one can be based on innocent ignorance/curiosity. A young white child is spending time with a black person for the first time and says "your hair is weird", is a vastly then if that same person said it while in high school and was bullying the black kid in class. The former isn't racist and the latter is.
I don't rail against social justice, progress is good and I think everyone of every creed / sexuality / gender / etc should be free to express themselves and live their best lives without being judged for who they were born or identify as.
What I do rail against though is the use of manipulating language to bully and harass people because a social credit / status / clout of trying to always be finding demons to expose is the norm. I personally believe that people who do this (often the "social justice warriors" so to speak) are root for most of the radicalization of BOTH sides of the political spectrum in the western world right now.
Idk, I struggle with this. I agree that watering down words is a problem. For example see people saying speech can be violence or even inaction can be violence or some like, but I think humans are tempted to ascribe the past to evil. If you think racism has to be intentional then it's an easy jump to say that racists must be aware of their racism, and before you know it you believe that evil looks like Voldemort and not some guy administering a study about syphilis. I think the truth is people in the past were much more explicitly racist, but also used a lot of the same excuses you'd see today. Things like the economics dictating that film should be optimized for light skin, or worrying about property values or something. By and large people don't think of themselves as racist so they don't do things with racist intent, they just happen to be racist and that influences the the things they do. Plus I'm not convinced that anything has free will making the whole question of intent less useful anyway.
But, I also definitely do think there is something worse about someone who hates black people and uses a racial slur to describe them compared to a model trained on humanity doing the same, but certainly both are huge problems, and it can't slip my mind that the racist person was also just trained on humanity's racism
Imagine that you had a co-worker who seemed totally normal 90% of the time... But about once a week, someone would bring up a topic that made them go full nazi or attempt to seduce their coworker. That's where we are with LLM-based generative text. It's not (just) about PR, it's about putting guardrails around the many many many circumstances the tech can do harm or just seem ignorant.
Imagine having a coworker like that.. But he's fully remote, and basically generated in real time by AI (appearance on video, voice etc). Maybe that's where we're going? :) then humans would be hired to occasionally pop in and pass some heavier scrutiny.
> Imagine that you had a co-worker who seemed totally normal 90% of the time... But about once a week, someone would bring up a topic that made them go full nazi or attempt to seduce their coworker.
This is my mental image of how company happy-hour-Fridays play out. It's one of the reasons I don't drink.
[And if you're curious, in fact I'm not fun at parties ;) ]
For images/ video I can see merit, ex: using that nudity inference project on images of children, but text seems particularly pointless.