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Amazon scraps secret AI recruiting tool that showed bias against women

reuters.com

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Re: Amazon scraps secret AI recruiting tool that showed bias against women

#191

Post by macinjosh »

zby wrote: post #183
macinjosh wrote: post #181

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I didn't mean to imply the males I worked with weren't equally good. I was simply pointing out that, in my (anecdotal) experience, I couldn't see any reason non-males couldn't do the job well.

So everyone you haver worked with have always been exceedingly competent and smart?

Obviously not. Every time I've worked with someone incompetent they tend to get fired rather quickly and I don't work with them anymore. As far as female vs. male goes I've worked with way more males than females and I just haven't happened to work with any females that have been fired for incompetence. Perhaps my level of judgement on other's performance is too lax but I tend to focus on my own performance and less on that of others. That's management's job, not mine.

Re: Amazon scraps secret AI recruiting tool that showed bias against women

#192

Post by Marazan »

macinjosh wrote: post #93

This will be unpopular but I don't care. What is the evidence that the source data for this 'AI' is biased because the men it came from did not want to hire women? Is there a reserve of unemployed non-male engineers out there? If so what evidence is there of that? Technical talent is both expensive and a rare commodity for tech companies. The non-male engineers I've worked with have always been exceedingly competent,…

If there was an untapped market of engineers you'd better believe every tech company would be taking advantage of it.

That's exactly the same argument used to justify every regressive policy. If x was true then rational y action would happen.

But that's the poo tof racism and sexism rational y action doesn't happen due to the -ism.

Re: Amazon scraps secret AI recruiting tool that showed bias against women

#193

Post by fizwhiz »

thoughtexplorer wrote: post #139

Anyone who has worked at tech companies and has been involved in the hiring process knows the following: The best thing to be right now is a woman engineer. You can easily get hired within the week. Unfortunately this doesn't seem to be well known outside of those involved in hiring.

Is this anecdotal? Are you insinuating that women have an upper hand now for reasons beyond their skillset?

Re: Amazon scraps secret AI recruiting tool that showed bias against women

#194

Post by macinjosh »

Marazan wrote: post #192
macinjosh wrote: post #93

This will be unpopular but I don't care. What is the evidence that the source data for this 'AI' is biased because the men it came from did not want to hire women? Is there a reserve of unemployed non-male engineers out there? If so what evidence is there of that? Technical talent is both expensive and a rare commodity for tech companies. The non-male engineers I've worked with have always been exceedingly competent,…

If there was an untapped market of engineers you'd better believe every tech company would be taking advantage of it. That's exactly the same argument used to justify every regressive policy. If x was true then rational y action would happen. But that's the poo tof racism and sexism rational y action doesn't happen due to the -ism.

Do you really think white men care so much about keeping down other groups of people that they would prioritize it over making more money and having more access to good workers? That sounds like a conspiracy theory to me.

Re: Amazon scraps secret AI recruiting tool that showed bias against women

#195

Post by hannasanarion »

weliketocode wrote: post #152
darawk wrote: post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It seems like they did think it through, though? And that's why it's being shelved. I don't really see what the story is here. It seems like the whole process worked exactly as it should - Amazon tried something, it had some unintended consequences, they caught it, and shelved it.

Agreed. There is no story here.

The story is, some ML researchers did their job properly and detected ethical issues before they became a problem. That's more rare than you'd think.

Re: Amazon scraps secret AI recruiting tool that showed bias against women

#197

Post by grandmczeb »

tomp wrote: post #190
theptip wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> "No bias" means that gender is irrelevant False. If we're talking about the technical statistical definition, bias means systematic deviation from the underlying truth in the data -- see this article by Chris Stucchio with some images for clarification: https://jacobitemag.com/2017/08/29/a-i-bias-doesnt-mean-what... "In statistics, a “bias” is defined as a statistical predictor which makes errors that all have the…

I think the comments I replied to mean bias as in “sexist bias”.

Bias as in racism, sexism, etc, has multiple definitions, some of which are mutually exclusive.

Re: Amazon scraps secret AI recruiting tool that showed bias against women

#198

Post by beat »

Garbage in, garbage out.

The system failed because they were trying to solve the wrong problem, or maybe more specifically, didn't solve the problem that led to the problems with the AI. Amazon was treating the hiring problem as an efficiency problem alone, and ignoring the bias problem. So they wound up training the AI to do a shitty job much faster than humans ever could be shitty - and, by analyzing the data in a way the human results weren't analyzed, showed the failings of the human hiring process.

Existing process is sexist. Automate to "improve" it, and you wind up with something even more sexist. What this means is that Amazon needs to go back and revamp their whole hiring process to make it fair, before trying to make it faster.

Re: Amazon scraps secret AI recruiting tool that showed bias against women

#199

Post by N0RMAN »

bicubic wrote: post #124
commandlinefan wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah - I'm not even expressing an unpopular opinion, just asking a (leading) question: where are all these women who are chomping at the bit to get into _technical_ positions like programming but find themselves being turned away by biased recruiters? I've never even seen somebody _claim_ that they were a woman who couldn't find a tech job, just people wondering where all the women were.

Last place I worked at had to invest in additional resources to hire several females because the office was mostly male and applicants were overwhelmingly male. We did eventually find a few great female applicants, but it took a lot of work and a lot of time dedicated specifically to that goal. There does not exist some magical undiscovered pool of talented female engineers that are being turned away by biased recrui…

Just being female is a qualification at your workplace?

Re: Amazon scraps secret AI recruiting tool that showed bias against women

#200

Post by Consultant32452 »

fuscy wrote: post #25

The eye opening thing here is not that the AI failed, but why it failed. At start the AI is like a baby, it doesn't know anything or have any opinions. By teaching it using a set of data, in this case a set of resumes and the outcome then it can form an opinion. The AI becoming biased tells that the "teacher" was biased also. So actually Amazon's recruiting process seems to be a mess with the technical skills on the…

Without regard to this particular issue, you also have to concern yourself with the bias of the person determining if the AI has a bias.
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