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Google Has a Striking History of Bias Against Black Girls

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Re: Google Has a Striking History of Bias Against Black Girls

#261

Post by danso »

perl4ever wrote: post #254
forapurpose wrote: post #250

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Ditto for "black girls": either your looking for porn or for stock photos. What other intentions do you have with such a query? Consider the possibility that the user is a black girl, or her parent. Generally, I'm careful not to assume I can anticipate the perspectives of everyone else.

Do white boys ever enter the query "white boys" into a search engine? I assume some HN users could speak to this...

To answer your immediate question, "white boys" is not uncommon in popular usage. People might look it up in the process of looking up a lyric or obscure title/name for a song/group.

The phrase "white boys" in general seems to be mostly desexualized. You can call someone a "white boy", either as a mild insult (like describing something as "vanilla") or a term of endearment. I think that's predicated from most people (in the U.S.) realizing that white boys/men are the status quo.

I'll ignore race and just say that I think the word "girls" in general has far more of a sexual/gendered connotation in U.S. usage. "Boy/Man" is considerably more generic and all-purpose. I use "Boy/Man/Guy" in casual conversation regardless of audience gender, e.g. e.g. "Boy, that was fucked up!" or "Man oh man that's got to hurt". I can't think of a single time in normal conversation where I would ever say "Girl" or "Lady" without referring to a female.

Re: Google Has a Striking History of Bias Against Black Girls

#262

Post by sokoloff »

PeterisP wrote: post #204
jancsika wrote: post #159

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> What you just observed and described is that technology _is_ unbiased and robotic. Just to get calibrated: what is an example-- real or imagined-- of technology that is biased?

For example, a search algorithm with an override that removes all links of sexual nature for certain hardcoded queries (say, "black girls") could be an example of a biased technology. If I'd have to make a definition, then it would probably be a technology that somehow encodes an assumption that doesn't match reality. In this context, saying that "black girls" is an innocent search term and users searching for it don…

I had a person on my team preparing a presentation and for whatever (reasonable) reason was looking for a stock image of a rabbit in winter with frozen precipitation around.

Just as our (very straight laced) CIO walked up behind, employee hit image search on "snow bunny". Hilarity ensued...

Re: Google Has a Striking History of Bias Against Black Girls

#263

Post by sokoloff »

oh-kumudo wrote: post #259
aperrien wrote: post #253

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What steps would you suggest taking to fix these historical problems?

I think should AA be applicable, it should only concern with one's socioeconomic status, not ethical background.

Presumably you mean "ethnic" not "ethical", right?

Re: Google Has a Striking History of Bias Against Black Girls

#264

Post by danso »

social_cooling wrote: post #56

I do not think the word "racism" is a good fit for this. There is no prejudice, or a belief that another race is superior. This is not singling out black women. Any search for "blonde teens" during that time would yield porn-related results too. A search engine just tries to give the most relevant search. Likely, a large part of the population was in search of sex when searching for these type of queries. The "bias"…

> I don't think a search engine index is the place to start change in society

That's such an odd sentiment, as if Google/Alphabet didn't become one of the world's current dominant and most influential companies because of its success with search and the search index. As if web search itself didn't effect major societal change.

Re: Google Has a Striking History of Bias Against Black Girls

#265

Post by manfredo »

s73v3r_ wrote: post #239
naasking wrote: post #229

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I'd think the author would argue that these racist biases should and could have been caught before going into production I think people who believe this significantly underestimate the difficulty of solving these problems.

I think it's more that we think that they're not even bothering to test those things, because they're not thinking about it.

How would you test something like this, if not aggregating user reports? Attempting to preemptively think of every possible thing that could be construed as politically incorrect is a Sisyphean task. It's a lot like the "H8GAYS" airline confirmation code that made headlines [1]. Delta probably blacklisted all profane words, but there are still combinations that can be perceived as offensive. Similarly, I once worked at a summer camp teens that generated users' passwords by picking two words and two numbers (all profanity was blacklisted as were 69, 88, 13, and I think a few other numbers). That didn't stop a camp attendee's parents from getting called in because their daughter was assigned the password "bloodyunhappy12" (the concern was that "bloody unhappy" referred to menstruation).

[1] http://newsfeed.time.com/2013/12/17/delta-airlines-is-very-s...

Re: Google Has a Striking History of Bias Against Black Girls

#266

Post by manfredo »

danso wrote: post #252
laylao wrote: post #242

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'd argue that most of the 'algorithms are evil' crowd don't even understand the problem to begin with since many of them do not come from a technical background.

How much does the average driver have to understand about automotive and mechanical engineering before they can form a reasonable criticism about defective/fatal design?

Physical products are much easier to intuit your way around than software. For cars, effectively everyone knows what the engine, fuel tank, tires, and drive selection lever are (though they may call the last one a "PRNDL"). Even if they don't know exactly how an alternator works, they understand that they need to drive their car around after they jump it to recharge the battery.

By comparison, I think most people don't even know the basic architecture of a computer, let alone the applications that run on it. Most people don't have an understanding of the network stack - I consider people ahead of the curve if they know the difference between LAN and the wider internet. Some people even think it's possible to download more RAM...

Re: Google Has a Striking History of Bias Against Black Girls

#267

Post by monktastic1 »

I see a lot of comments about whether Google results should be reflective of society or unbiased, but little discussion of who gets to define what is unbiased. Since that itself is a judgement call, I don't see how they won't be accused of introducing their own bias.

Re: Google Has a Striking History of Bias Against Black Girls

#268

Post by pixl97 »

danso wrote: post #236
naasking wrote: post #229

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I'd think the author would argue that these racist biases should and could have been caught before going into production I think people who believe this significantly underestimate the difficulty of solving these problems.

I think that's likely. But the people tasked to solve these problems aren't always given the right priorities. Detecting/classifying the faces of dark-skinned humans is inextricably more complicated than it is with light-skinned humans. It requires significantly more training data, more computational power, and more testing time to reach the same accuracy as a light-skin-only camera and classifier. We would deride Ub…

>Likewise, we can judge a company for releasing a general consumer webcam that fails to fully function for 10-15% of the American population.

But then you get into an even deeper question 'are minorities/blacks 10% of said consumers of products?'. Poverty, for example, could mean that the product doesn't work for 5% of the buyers, which then begs the question 'how much effort do you put in fixing the problem for a small percentage of the buyers?', especially when the amount of effort is going to be very large/time consuming/expensive. If you are a person looking for racism, you will judge google as racist. If you are looking at it from a position of a business attempting to make a profit on a product, you will not see it as racist.

Re: Google Has a Striking History of Bias Against Black Girls

#269

Post by laylao »

danso wrote: post #252
laylao wrote: post #242

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'd argue that most of the 'algorithms are evil' crowd don't even understand the problem to begin with since many of them do not come from a technical background.

How much does the average driver have to understand about automotive and mechanical engineering before they can form a reasonable criticism about defective/fatal design?

Driving follows physics mechanics, is a skill and is much more involved than search. Search is designed to be a black box for most people.

But ignoring that, no, I still would not like to see people professionally criticizing processes and products that they do not understand. Some technical knowledge is a must for people who do professional talks or presentations, write books and research papers and teach on the topic.

For algorithms and ML, I would expect at the very least a bachelors in math/CS or the equivalent in work/personal project experience.

Re: Google Has a Striking History of Bias Against Black Girls

#270

Post by wutbrodo »

komali2 wrote: post #107
wutbrodo wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> This seems like a bad idea to me, especially in the context of a discussion about how to reduce the political/social influence of Google. It seems to me that there's an enormous contingent of people who wants to yell about the influence of Google and Facebook and then yell even louder about how they're not actively intervening to skew content towards their political preferences (ie increase their influence massivel…

Irrelevant to the content itself, but I have noticed a tendency in myself to treat the media and the internet as a homogeneous entity. So I might see a bunch of articles and comments about how people want to punish Hollywood for sex abuse, and a bunch more about how a given politician isn't actually guilty, and I think in my brain "well which is it!!" But then if I start paying attention to the papers themselves and…

No, I'm definitely aware of that phenomenon and definitely check for it before I say things like this. I'm thinking of specific individual people I know, whether in real life or consistent pseudonyms on communities I have exposure to. It happens often enough in that small, detailed dataset that I'm comfortable extrapolating a little bit to the larger dataset instead of assuming that it's different subgroups with contradictory viewpoints.

I come across thoughtful people all the time who have a baseline assumption of intelligence and intellectual honesty that doesn't match almost any group you're likely to actually come across. My prior for people having obviously contradictory views is simply higher than yours.

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