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Facebook apology as AI labels black men 'primates'

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Re: Facebook apology as AI labels black men 'primates'

#261

Post by wpietri »

oreilles wrote: post #75
wpietri wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This reminds me of a favorite tweet from 2013: "Then Google Maps was like, 'turn right on Malcolm Ten Boulevard' and I knew there were no black engineers working there" -- https://twitter.com/alliebland/status/402990270402543616 Facebook, like a lot of tech companies, has long had problems with diversity in engineering. Here's an article from April that discusses specific incidents and the broader background: https:/…

This isn't a problem with diversity. Everybody knows how to pronounce Malcom X. And it's not like just because a google engineer was black that he was like "oh, let's try and see if Malcom X is pronounced correctly because he's black and I'm black too". This only happens in white people's brain.

You realize that the person I'm quoting isn't white, right?

Let's separate the general case from the specific. Generally, we know that representation in the people who make things changes what they make. This is obvious and undeniable. For example, look at ASCII vs Unicode. The Chinese invented movable type 500 years before Gutenberg, so it's not like the idea of printing non-roman characters was novel. In the age of telegraphy, Europeans developed encodings that included umlauts and accents; by 1851 they were merged into International Morse Code.

So why in 1963 was ASCII codified without any of that? And why did that become the dominant standard for an extended period? Because it was mainly Americans in the rooms where the technology was being created.

Similarly, we know that standard color films were developed by white people to represent white people well: https://www.vox.com/2015/9/18/9348821/photography-race-bias

And we all know how this happens. It's the same reason a lot of open-source software is good for a developer audience, not an end-user one: making things means iterating on them until they're good enough for the people involved.

That's the general case, so let's return to the specific case. If you want to prove that ML systems doing racist stuff has nothing to do with who made it, then you can't just handwave it away. You have to show why that specific project was set up so carefully and so well that it would avoid the natural pitfalls of any technology project. And then despite that it went on to do racist stuff. For reasons that you'd then have to explain.

Re: Facebook apology as AI labels black men 'primates'

#262

Post by wpietri »

throwcommonsns wrote: post #141
wpietri wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This reminds me of a favorite tweet from 2013: "Then Google Maps was like, 'turn right on Malcolm Ten Boulevard' and I knew there were no black engineers working there" -- https://twitter.com/alliebland/status/402990270402543616 Facebook, like a lot of tech companies, has long had problems with diversity in engineering. Here's an article from April that discusses specific incidents and the broader background: https:/…

This is a contrarian take that may get me downvoted and unfairly labeled, but I encourage critical thinking instead: I've struggled with people telling me that these FAANG companies have "diversity problems," as a person of color myself. A majority of software engineers are female and male immigrants from East Asia and South Asia. These population centers are some of the most diverse regions of the world. The enginee…

Nobody is saying they don't count toward diversity. What people are saying is that the conspicuous exclusion of less favored racial groups does not get erased because they have some people from other groups.

Put more frankly, the success of recent immigrants does not erase America's long history of brutality and exploitation toward blacks and Latin Americans. The latter is a problem that we have to solve regardless.

And I think it's worth noting that some of the immigrants have brought their own biases with them, such that caste discrimination is now also a problem in Silicon Valley: https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2020/10/27/indian-...

Re: Facebook apology as AI labels black men 'primates'

#263

Post by silisili »

ceejayoz wrote: post #258
silisili wrote: post #153

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can we be certain that it didn't label any white people this way? I feel like if it did, they likely wouldn't care. This isn't a comment about whether or not the problem is racist, or what it means, which I care not to discuss. Remember that nearly every cartoonist compared GWB to a chimp. In fairness, he kinda resembled one. Doing so to Obama would have been immediately flagged as racist. I don't need a history less…

> Can we be certain that it didn't label any white people this way? I would expect their reps would be shouting this loudly if it were the case. > Remember that nearly every cartoonist compared GWB to a chimp. In fairness, he kinda resembled one. Doing so to Obama would have been immediately flagged as racist. Sure, because context and history both matter.

I definitely agree with that, absolutely.

I guess my point was, ineloquently put, humans of any color are very apelike in general. It's sheer curiosity on my part whether AI is -only- making this type of mistake with black people, not any cry of racism or reverse racism or unfairness.

Re: Facebook apology as AI labels black men 'primates'

#264

Post by wpietri »

throwcommonsns wrote: post #244
strken wrote: post #226

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The short answer is that tech companies run diversity programs for three reasons: they believe in righting wrongs, they don't want to be sued for biased hiring practices, and they don't want bad PR. All three require under-represented minorities. Turning it back on you, what should the point of a diversity program be? What's meant to be achieved outside those three goals?

While I certainly understand bad PR (a surprising number of people lack critical thinking skills), what is wrong or biased about hiring for coding positions based on merit-based performance on an objective coding test? Anybody regardless of background or group membership that passes will be hired, meaning it is fair and unbiased, by definition -- that is the diversity program, and if there is some lack of objectivity…

You really need to interrogate "merit" and "objective". Nominally objective standards have long been used to advance racial discrimination in the US. For example: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Literacy_test

You should also look up the extensive critiques of meritocracy as a concept. There's a lot of literature there.

Further, I know of no major tech company who uses a nominally "objective coding test" as the only criterion for hiring. And they shouldn't, because being good at taking coding tests is not the job and not what we should be hiring for.

Re: Facebook apology as AI labels black men 'primates'

#265

Post by wpietri »

IncRnd wrote: post #124
wpietri wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This reminds me of a favorite tweet from 2013: "Then Google Maps was like, 'turn right on Malcolm Ten Boulevard' and I knew there were no black engineers working there" -- https://twitter.com/alliebland/status/402990270402543616 Facebook, like a lot of tech companies, has long had problems with diversity in engineering. Here's an article from April that discusses specific incidents and the broader background: https:/…

Your comment implies black engineers will check that Malcom X Boulevard is pronounced correctly. That's awfully specious.

It really doesn't. There are more things, Horatio.

Re: Facebook apology as AI labels black men 'primates'

#266

Post by wpietri »

sinyug wrote: post #100
wpietri wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This reminds me of a favorite tweet from 2013: "Then Google Maps was like, 'turn right on Malcolm Ten Boulevard' and I knew there were no black engineers working there" -- https://twitter.com/alliebland/status/402990270402543616 Facebook, like a lot of tech companies, has long had problems with diversity in engineering. Here's an article from April that discusses specific incidents and the broader background: https:/…

> Facebook, like a lot of tech companies, has long had problems with diversity in engineering. If that is the case, why is it that Google voice nav routinely butchers the names of places and roads in India in spite of having thousands of Indian engineers on staff? Could we blame the intractability of the problem, or just plain old incompetence, before we blame every single problem in the world on racism and lack of '…

Given that the goal of racism is to structure society, and given how well that succeeded in America, I don't think it's unreasonable to ask whether it's at play in pretty much any situation where we see racially biased outcomes.

But it is an excellent question why Google Maps is still terrible at Indian place names even though they have plenty of people internally who not only could help, but would be delighted to. The answer to that will be essentially sociological. If you think that answer in no way includes structural inequity despite it being pervasive in America since its founding, you will have to explain how you think Google managed to eliminate that in the Maps division and then managed to re-introduce some sort of structure that leaves a wealth of internal knowledge untapped.

Re: Facebook apology as AI labels black men 'primates'

#267

Post by wpietri »

jessaustin wrote: post #160
oreilles wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This isn't a problem with diversity. Everybody knows how to pronounce Malcom X. And it's not like just because a google engineer was black that he was like "oh, let's try and see if Malcom X is pronounced correctly because he's black and I'm black too". This only happens in white people's brain.

In what universe is "Ten" a more common pronunciation of "X" than "X"? You might have an argument for "II" or "III", but I'll be shocked if any street in USA is named after the tenth generation of really unimaginative namers.

For sure. If we're going with the common pronunciation of Roman numerals in English names, it's "Tenth". E.g., We don't say "Henry Ford III" as "Henry Ford Three" but "Henry Ford the Third".

Re: Facebook apology as AI labels black men 'primates'

#268

Post by wpietri »

giancarlostoro wrote: post #183
elmomle wrote: post #171

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The implication is that a black person would be more likely to recognize the inherent flaw in automatically interpreting "X" as "10", and in all honestly that's probably true. It isn't a matter of testing, it's a matter of having people with a diverse set of cultural perspectives in the room when decisions like that are made to begin with.

Diversity doesnt guarantee you automatically catch or account for edge cases. As a minority I am disturbed by some of the odd takes people have about diversity. Theres thousands upon thousands of roads. Unless you have a QA team test directions to every road in the country you wont ever catch the issue with a road named Malcom X. You don’t even have to be ‘diverse’ to know who that is.

It doesn't guarantee it, but it helps.

I personally have gotten bugs fixed at Google. How? Because I, a white man, spotted a bug, cared about it, and talked to white men of my acquaintance at Google who had enough power to get things done. How did I know them? From other tech companies created, run, and majority staffed by other white men.

Why am I in these networks at all? Well, my dad was a software developer and he introduced me early on. How did he get his start? His dad, an insurance company exec, brought him in to deal with this newfangled computer thing they had just gotten. That was in Milwaukee in the mid-1960s. I promise you that although Milwaukee had a significant black population, exactly zero of them were insurance company executives in the mid-1960s.

So what Allie Bland knew when she wrote her tweet was that she did not have any connection to Google where she might be able to get a to-her glaringly obvious pronunciation issue fixed. That in her estimation no black person did. And I see no reason to think she was wrong.

Re: Facebook apology as AI labels black men 'primates'

#269

Post by wpietri »

hattmall wrote: post #229
throwcommonsns wrote: post #141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is a contrarian take that may get me downvoted and unfairly labeled, but I encourage critical thinking instead: I've struggled with people telling me that these FAANG companies have "diversity problems," as a person of color myself. A majority of software engineers are female and male immigrants from East Asia and South Asia. These population centers are some of the most diverse regions of the world. The enginee…

There is literally no right answer, the very nature of modern diversity is that it will always be a moving target. That is until we get over the entire concept of diversity which is racist / discriminatory at it's core.

That's incorrect. The main use of diversity is in an antiracist fashion. I'd suggest you read one of Kendi's books. Stamped from the Beginning has clear and readable descriptions of the difference, but it's a relatively long work, so you might start with one of his shorter books.

Re: Facebook apology as AI labels black men 'primates'

#270

Post by hnxs »

opinion-is-bad wrote: post #128
dheera wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[self-censored to prevent further downvotes because HN is downvoting me for what I said and the delete button is gone; sorry it seems discussion about solutions to racial issues isn't welcome here]

Is there a sizable population of unemployed black engineers living in the United States to hire from? What if the qualified candidates simply don’t exist to fill the seats?

are you familiar with the h-1b visa system? there’s a shortage of qualified candidates across every metric you can name for top-band engineering roles in the US.
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