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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

#271

Post by wutbrodo »

btilly wrote: post #129
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…

That can happen even if everyone involved is individually logical and rational. See the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Condorcet_paradox for more. It happens even more easily if you're lumping people into a single group, but the individuals that you see speaking out about one topic are different than the individuals that you see speaking out about another. The upshot is that from your described experience you cannot c…

I'm not speaking of groups holding collectively contradictory views, I'm speaking of the group consisting of individuals who hold individually contradictory views. I know many people personally who hold the views described above.

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

#272

Post by RangerScience »

PeterisP wrote: post #199
RangerScience wrote: post #194

Earlier quoted context omitted.

By having a mirror, we can see and correct our flaws. I used to be (well, still am, a bit) worried that the increasing automation of our social structures (credit scores, admission processes, etc) will just encode these biases in ways that cannot be altered. But then saw how much of NIPS was about "fairness". If these biases get encoded, they are measurable, examinable, detectable - and can then be accounted for in w…

Is the (assuming it's true, but it seems plausible) situation that the majority of users searching for "black girls" actually do want to find sexual content instead of simply smiling faces a flaw that needs correcting? Is their intent unfair in some way, are their sexual preferences unacceptable? If I don't like what I see in my mirror, will putting makeup on the mirror improve my face? Will removing naughty sites fr…

So, I'd dance around the issue.

Google's search algorithm is "fair", but society is not: It is not "fair" that these search terms are over sexualized.

This is, of course, given some particular morality and ethos; your may not find society unfair in this way. (I do)

My point is that now it is visible and you can make more informed choices.

If you don't like what you see in mirror, why is makeup the "fix" of choice? Alter diets, exercise patterns; sun exposure, fitness levels, stress levels...

> Will removing naughty sites from the search results

Potentially. We're feedback loops as well; if these terms result in what someone is after, they will use those terms: if they don't, they won't. Eventually, I would expect people to stop trying to search with them; to then stop communicating with them (as meaning that); to then stop thinking with them (as meaning that).

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

#274

Post by komali2 »

sheepmullet wrote: post #238
komali2 wrote: post #210

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>we are expected to filter our world views and interactions through it I am replying in the following manner only because I believe the discourse around this subject is usually poorly defined. It is not an attack of you or yours, but my attempt to help us all better understand what we're talking about: By saying "filter through it," what do you mean by "it?" What are the rules of the filter you are applying? When you…

> Shouldn't women feel comfortable with their coworkers regardless of local culture? The problem is what makes a woman feel uncomfortable is culturally driven - when you have such a mix of cultures at work people are bound to make innocent mis-steps. Californian companies have a tendency of looking at it by race and gender identity. Do you assume the best of people or do you assume the worst?

If you're asking, I personally assume the best.

I understand where you're coming from - maybe you're referring to things like "micro-aggressions" and other things many of us would find silly? Yup, definitely something that needs tackling. I've never argued that there would be a clear algorithm for "this makes people uncomfortable to the point that it should be illegal, this does not."

Luckily, our judges and court system are pretty good at exactly this sort of thing. I think a law on the books that goes something along the lines of "nobody should be made to feel sexually uncomfortable at work" starts the definition, and then subsequent court cases sharpens it. Sorry, Tim saying "great haircut!" doesn't count, but oops yea Janice saying "quite the cucumber you're hiding away there, Bill," while waggling her eyebrows does. Etc.

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

#275

Post by mc32 »

labster wrote: post #147

I think the thesis is wrong here. Google has a striking history of removing bias against black women. People make content for the web. People are racist, and make lots of racist assumptions in their writing. Society is racist. This results in Google's algorithms reflecting the corpus they scanned, and the searches that are made. But the search is just a reflection of us, and how terrible we all are. Google gets embar…

I have to agree with you. You can go to any country with a fetish of some sort and have "surprising results" for innocent searches. Go to google.co.jp and search for "Russian Women" [ロシアの女性] Is that a racist algorithm?

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

#276

Post by Sylos »

kolpa wrote: post #180
jjeaff wrote: post #153

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It seems a given that any search that does not include explicit "pornographic terms" should never return pornographic results.

What are explicit "pornographic terms" ?

Yeah, that's much harder to define than people generally assume. Cleavage, for example, is generally perceived as sexy, but seldomly as pornographic.

In general, in our Western society, the whole breast seems to be fine, as long as the nipple is covered up. So, what they could do is show you nipples, if you actually search "nipple". But maybe you're looking for male nipples, which obviously are not pornographic at all, so that doesn't work either.

"Vagina" and "penis" have enough educational material behind them that that may actually be what you're searching for.

"Pussy" could be a cat, "dick" could be a Richard.

Which is another aspect, making this harder. Our society loves using non-sexual words to refer to sexual things.

I suppose, if you actually throw in the word "porn", there's hardly ever going to be a scenario where you were not looking for pornographic content, but it's not entirely impossible either.

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

#277

Post by ralusek »

RangerScience wrote: post #272
PeterisP wrote: post #199

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is the (assuming it's true, but it seems plausible) situation that the majority of users searching for "black girls" actually do want to find sexual content instead of simply smiling faces a flaw that needs correcting? Is their intent unfair in some way, are their sexual preferences unacceptable? If I don't like what I see in my mirror, will putting makeup on the mirror improve my face? Will removing naughty sites fr…

So, I'd dance around the issue. Google's search algorithm is "fair", but society is not: It is not "fair" that these search terms are over sexualized. This is, of course, given some particular morality and ethos; your may not find society unfair in this way. (I do) My point is that now it is visible and you can make more informed choices. If you don't like what you see in mirror, why is makeup the "fix" of choice? Al…

What you're proposing is a hack, and one with a lot of negative side effects.

First of all, to go with the obvious, you better hope that what Google deems the direction they'd like to alter reality is aligned with your own, because I'm quite sure that this will mostly be untrue.

Secondly, you're attempting to patch a problem at much too high of a level; making people less racist by altering what they're able to ingest, particularly by altering unbiased reality, is a bandaid that is destined to fail hard. What if, say, we wanted to change the negative stereotype of black Americans engaging in criminal behavior at substantially higher rates, so we demanded that Google remove access to racially distributed crime statistics. Many countries already do this, such as Sweden. We will have lost a primary tool with which to assess the nature of our reality, contextualize it, and strategize about it effectively.

I'm more interested in a free society bettering reality than I am with hoping that Google's ideal version of reality is aligned with my own... particularly because I would still consider it to be a horrible solution even if it was.

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

#278

Post by sangnoir »

pixl97 wrote: post #268
danso wrote: post #236

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 sm…

> But then you get into an even deeper question 'are minorities/blacks 10% of said consumers of products?'.

Maybe run that question by legal first! Protected classes exist for a good reason (IMO). What percentage of a restaurant's business is from people in wheelchairs, yet the law mandates ramp access.

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

#279

Post by danmaz74 »

danso wrote: post #183
labster wrote: post #147

I think the thesis is wrong here. Google has a striking history of removing bias against black women. People make content for the web. People are racist, and make lots of racist assumptions in their writing. Society is racist. This results in Google's algorithms reflecting the corpus they scanned, and the searches that are made. But the search is just a reflection of us, and how terrible we all are. Google gets embar…

I agree that there's too much blame-the-algorithm sentiment here, but if I had to guess, I'd think the author would argue that these racist biases should and could have been caught before going into production -- i.e. it doesn't have to be an inevitable cycle of ad hoc public shaming and repentance. These biases could be identified just as other SERP problems are identified before each algorithm update. Just like the…

> I'd think the author would argue that these racist biases should and could have been caught before going into production -- i.e. it doesn't have to be an inevitable cycle of ad hoc public shaming and repentance.

They could have caught more cases before going to production - that's a truism. But when X number of cases get "fixed", there are other N*X cases/other communities/other minorities that won't, and there will be ad hoc public shaming that will caught enough attention to become relevant, and so on. Because the number of things that offend at least somebody is infinite.

My point is that there is no absolute way to tell what's offensive and what isn't - it's all subjective. There is no perfect way to fix them all - not even in theory, because there are conflicting priorities - and public outrage serves as an imperfect way to prioritize the most inter-subjectively blatant. Are there other ways? Sure, but they won't stop the periodic public outrage.

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

#280

Post by MichaelGG »

forapurpose wrote: post #250
MichaelGG wrote: post #218

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, Google does not try to mirror content. It tries to provide the best results for users. Results the user wants to click on and are relevant. Searching for "professor style", nobody wants it to return a minority professor style. Even she doesn't, at scale. If she and others did, they'd be Googling "professor style", not clicking, then Googling "professor style for black women" and results would improve/personalize.…

> 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.

Ok so why is she searching for "black girls"? I don't search for "Canadian guy". Outside of wanting a generic/stereotype photo, what're the reasons?

Same for "professor style" and expecting to get something other than that stereotypical brown sweater with elbow patches look.

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