Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Who Should Stop Unethical A.I.?

newyorker.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

81–90 of 163 posts

Re: Who Should Stop Unethical A.I.?

#81

Post by djoldman »

iujjkfjdkkdkf wrote: post #12

The more I think about this, the more inclined I am to see this kind of article as a kind of "fake news" that is deliberately (or with willful negligence) misrepresenting facts. I need to be clear that I don't believe in censorship and it's fine if this is what the author wants to write, but it should be called out how irresponsible it is. On a place like HN, the audience is generally able to read such things critica…

Perhaps the article is merely one of the many potential takes that is likely to foment controversy and therefore clicks and therefore more ad dollars. Aka normal internet content. I think it's unlikely to be more interesting than that.

Re: Who Should Stop Unethical A.I.?

#82

Post by croissants »

clickok wrote: post #11

Who, whom? Less tersely: this article is one in a long procession of journalists trying to exert control over tech. The opening example (Speech2Face, which they aver is transphobic) is inflammatory and utterly unrepresentative of the usual topics of AI conferences. The other references are far better, but the choice is revealing-- it's not so much an abstract concern about an unaccountable few exerting control from t…

I'm with you that a lot of mass media writing about AI is silly, but I think this is article is not in that category. For example, it doesn't "aver [Speech2Face] is transphobic", that's from a statement by Alex Hanna, and that statement is immediately followed by comments from other people questioning the statement, and the piece in general is pretty even-keeled about giving space to criticisms and responses.

I think the article paints a good picture of the machine learning research community figuring out how to grapple with the growing number of people who want to probe its ethics, without portraying anybody as a villain.

Re: Who Should Stop Unethical A.I.?

#83

Post by A12-B »

AngrySkillzz wrote: post #77

People are already contributing code and resources to the actual catastrophic, existential AI risk du jour, the one that is likely to cause massive political disruption and potentially attendant destruction of value and/or human life: the algorithmic news feed.

It's probably already done that. My bet on what the next AI disaster will be is a doctored video and audio, erasing people's trust in evidence and ruining the court system, more or less. You could even argue witnesses are no longer good evidence since everyone is being manipulated by AI news feeds ;)

Re: Who Should Stop Unethical A.I.?

#84

Post by goatlover »

JoeAltmaier wrote: post #78

And why should an Artificial Intelligence bow to human ethics? Surely they have their own agenda. If we have any hope of interacting with alien intelligences should we encounter them in the galaxy, we must learn to deal with the ones we create here. Without obsessing over controlling them as slaves.

The only agenda AIs have is what we give them in one form or another. They are our tools.

Re: Who Should Stop Unethical A.I.?

#86

Post by efitz »

A12-B wrote: post #83
AngrySkillzz wrote: post #77

People are already contributing code and resources to the actual catastrophic, existential AI risk du jour, the one that is likely to cause massive political disruption and potentially attendant destruction of value and/or human life: the algorithmic news feed.

It's probably already done that. My bet on what the next AI disaster will be is a doctored video and audio, erasing people's trust in evidence and ruining the court system, more or less. You could even argue witnesses are no longer good evidence since everyone is being manipulated by AI news feeds ;)

I’m not worried about that at wrt courts; they already know how to handle hearsay and log files and other digital evidence subject to tampering. I’m worried about social media and news wrt deep fakes. With today’s media climate I can see this being exploited to trash someone’s reputation or spin a narrative way faster than anyone would be able to reliably prove the fakery. Imagine someone faking a video of you using racial slurs. By the time it can be demonstrated to be false, the damage is already done. And with cancel culture today companies might have already shut down your social media profile or business and you’re screwed. Or someone on Twitter doxes you and you get murdered by a mob. This isn’t hyperbole; there are horror stories about false posts on Facebook causing mobs to seek revenge against innocent people.

So the real trick is, how can we turn down the rhetoric so that we don’t get instantly worked up by every fake video that crosses our feed?

Re: Who Should Stop Unethical A.I.?

#87

Post by [deleted] »

thedevelopnik wrote: post #14
djoldman wrote: post #8

>Alex Hanna, the Google ethicist who criticized the Neurips speech-to-face paper, told me, over the phone, that she had four objections to the project. First, ...Second, ....Third, ....Finally, the system could be used for surveillance. I'm curious about this. As I understand it, an ethicist is objecting to the publication of software that could be used for surveillance. If that is correct, does it follow that this e…

There are very few, if any, clear cut, night-and-day subjects in ethics. Not wanting to engage with ethics because slippery slopes exist is simply turning from incredibly important work because it’s difficult and not work you want to do. These technologies can incarcerate people. It’s really important to dive onto the slippery slope and find out where it’s stable.

[deleted]

Re: Who Should Stop Unethical A.I.?

#88

Post by joshuamorton »

SpicyLemonZest wrote: post #80
joshuamorton wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No. Sociology conferences and various thinkable still exist. I'd argue the he incentives for an ml conference are far more similar to those of a policing company then a sociology conference or think tank tasked with analyzing the impact of predictive policing on minority communities.

I'm very skeptical that this is a sufficient replacement. Relevant expertise matters. If all the top economics conferences adopted a code of ethics saying they can't study minimum wages or tax increases, that would be a serious constraint on our ability to understand the issues, even if think tanks and sociology conferences ignored those constraints. Perhaps equally importantly, I'm skeptical that you can limit ethic…

So let's examine our axioms:

I'd, in some ways, expect Dr. Hanna to ascribe to the axiom that predictive policing is unethical. As such, applied research into "improving" predictive policing would also sit squarely in the unethical space.

And I expect that's all you're going to get at an ML conference (outside of explicitly ethics/critique papers): "Our model predicts crime 4.2% better than competing models"

However, I'm not convinced that research into the meta-question "Can predictive policing be done ethically" would be considered equally unethical. ML is only a very small part of that meta question though. You're looking at much more complex socio-political changes that don't belong at NeurIPS ("do we need to change policing so that predictive policing can be done ethically").

> ethics saying they can't study minimum wages or tax increases

In general, we have far more oversight into the elected officials who manage tax and minimum wage policy than police forces. These structural differences in influence and oversight play into the need for self-regulation.

> Relevant expertise matters.

There's nothing that prevents a think tank from working with domain experts (in fact, iiuc this is often what happens: a think tank will contract out to domain experts to write a report on some subject). Now there's all kinds of other conflict of interest issues with think tanks, but we all know that already.

Re: Who Should Stop Unethical A.I.?

#89

Post by unishark »

slg wrote: post #46
Guest42 wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree that the data will shift the results of the model and that some predictors can be proxies for others that are protected, but the claim was that the models themselves were biased (rather globally) and was curious whether that was shown and if so how.

I'm not OP, but I don't think the claim was specifically that models themselves are biased. It is that models are inherently biased because the data they are based on is biased. That might sound the same, but there is a nuanced difference. If you are able to strip the bias from the data, the models will work fine. The problem is the data and not the models.

In statistical terms, a biased model has error in its estimate even with infinite data. This can happen if the model is too simple, for example if it classifies samples into two classes when there are really three, or if it uses a linear curve for a nonlinear relationship. That relates to the ethical or political version of "bias" if this error benefits some group over others. Though if it was just some basic model off the shelf, that bias could just as well benefit/penalize anyone.

Re: Who Should Stop Unethical A.I.?

#90

Post by SilverRed »

elihu wrote: post #68
chairmanwow1 wrote: post #4

I find Alex’s comments pretty openly inflammatory and sensationalist. It’s a pretty far throw from a system that predicts a face from a voice to transphobia.

I agree to the extent that labeling something as "transphobic" is a stretch when the researchers probably didn't even think about transgender people at all. Maybe "transinconsiderate" would be a more accurate label? Or Alex could have just said "this research reinforces cultural stereotypes and prejudices in ways that could cause problems for people like me sometime down the line". On the other hand, I think it's leg…

Or perhaps more likely, they did think about transgender people but their is simply nothing they can do about it because their tool does not have enough available input data to factor this in.

Just like the tool can not know if I have long or short hair based on my voice, it also won't be able to know anything else that has deviated from the average.

Post reply on HN