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Shirt Without Stripes

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Re: Shirt Without Stripes

#381

Post by parsimo2010 »

mherdeg wrote: post #310
onurcel wrote: post #293

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The point of the OP is that they claim they understand everything. Example: https://www.blog.google/products/search/search-language-unde...

OK, but what if an Amazon algorithm has actually learned that people who search for "shirt without stripes" are more likely to buy more things if the first image they see is a picture of a striped shirt?

I think it's more likely that they've A/B tested faulty algorithms and picked the one that's the least faulty.

I don't have proof, but I strongly believe that a search algorithm that returns what a customer is actually searching for will drive more sales. I suppose it's possible that with time, consistently bad results will beat a customer into submission and drive more sales of stuff the customer doesn't want. But I don't believe that's true, and this would only be the case if the customer accepts that the thing they want doesn't exist. If the customer is pretty sure that solid color shirts exist, they'll just shop elsewhere until they find it.

Re: Shirt Without Stripes

#382

Post by captainmuon »

This is something that has annoyed me since the Altavista times. I want to search for "madonna but not the singer", and find pictures of the holy icon. I can do "madonna -singer", but that fails if the page mentions the word "singer" a single time. Even if it is "This is a page about madonna statues, but not about the famous singer."

It would be great if I could add negative keywords to a website, or mark text as "don't index" or "index with a negative weight". But probably, people would game this in ways I can't imagine.

There is probably a clever ML solution for this, like having meaning-vectors for distinct ideas, and pushing pages that are close to one meaning away from the other meaning. Classification is easy if you have a keywords like "painting" and "catholic", but if it is "virgin" or "prayer" then it could be either meaning, so there is never a bullet-proof solution.

Re: Shirt Without Stripes

#383

Post by etherealG »

ghostwriter wrote: post #369
bradleybuda wrote: post #365

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's the efficient markets hypothesis applied to AI. "If the AI could make more money by showing something else, it would be showing something else".

in that case the applied AI stops being a Search tool (as was the purpose of the search bar) and becomes a new Ad tool. And this masquerading is not a great thing at all, for the same reason why people don't like bots pretending being humans during phone calls.

But it’s not a search tool. It’s a make Amazon money tool, as all their tools are. I think you misunderstand why amazon build these tools if you think they are to make your life easier in trying to locate things to buy on their site. That’s a happy coincidence. They build them to make money.

Re: Shirt Without Stripes

#384

Post by [deleted] »

nikanj wrote: post #305
seiferteric wrote: post #137

I have noticed in the past few years google results have become noticeable worse for similar reasons. Google used to _surprise_ me with how good it was able to understand what I was really looking for even when I put in vague terms. I remember being shocked on several occasions when putting in half remembered sentences, lyrics, expressions from something I had heard years ago and it being the first! result. I almost…

Your search for "skiing Norway" mostly returns results for skiing in the French Alps, because those pages have much higher visit rates. Google is a dumbass nowadays, and regularly ignores half your search terms to present you with absolutely irrelevant results, that have gotten lots of visits in the past.

[deleted]

Re: Shirt Without Stripes

#386

Post by etherealG »

rhizome wrote: post #354
mherdeg wrote: post #310

Earlier quoted context omitted.

OK, but what if an Amazon algorithm has actually learned that people who search for "shirt without stripes" are more likely to buy more things if the first image they see is a picture of a striped shirt?

Then the algorithm would not be acting in the customer's interests. Presumably this would be after the algo devalued people who clicked on "Next Page" until they came to a page that had stripeless shirts on it, or who, after the search, only ever clicked on stripeless shirts. "Deeds not words," dontchaknow.

But the algorithm wasn’t programmed to act in the customer’s interest. It was programmed in amazons.

Re: Shirt Without Stripes

#388

Post by DenisM »

njharman wrote: post #363
DenisM wrote: post #197

This problem is known as "attribution" - you have a "no" or "without" in the sentence, but you don't know where it belongs. One could (and one does) argue that the problem cannot be solved with statistical methods (ML), especially not in any domain where accuracy is required, such as medical recored analysis: "no evidence of cancer" and "evidence of no cancer" are very different things. Zooming out, the language fiel…

less than lay person, but in your example > "no evidence of cancer" and "evidence of no cancer" are very different things. Why is it not as simple "no belongs to the word it precedes" ? like unary operator, ! (not), in typical computer languages.

- evidence of no liver cancer

- no textbook evidence of cancer

Statements have structure, parsing them with simple rules like this is akin to parsing C++ with regular expressions.

Re: Shirt Without Stripes

#389

Post by angara »

DenisM wrote: post #197

This problem is known as "attribution" - you have a "no" or "without" in the sentence, but you don't know where it belongs. One could (and one does) argue that the problem cannot be solved with statistical methods (ML), especially not in any domain where accuracy is required, such as medical recored analysis: "no evidence of cancer" and "evidence of no cancer" are very different things. Zooming out, the language fiel…

Fascinating, do you have any links to papers about machine-verifiable formalisms?

Re: Shirt Without Stripes

#390

Post by jedberg »

bartread wrote: post #221
Alex3917 wrote: post #212

Earlier quoted context omitted.

At least this is relatively innocuous. Until recently if you did a Google Image Search for "person" or "people", it only showed white men.

I couldn't quite believe your comment when I read it so I did a Google image search for "person" and the results weren't a lot better than you'd suggested. Mostly white men, a few white women, a very few black women, a handful of Asians, and multiple instances of Terry Crews. The net result of that Google search, combined with the "Shirt Without Stripes" repo, leaves me even more unimpressed with the capabilities of…

If you really want to be disappointed, search for [doctor] and [nurse].

Unless things have really changed, [doctor] will be mostly white men and [nurse] will be mostly white and Filipino women.

But don't blame the AI. The AI has no morality. It simply reflects and amplifies the morality of the data it was given.

And in this case the data is the entirety of human knowledge that Google knows about.

So really you can't blame anyone but society for having such deeply engrained biases.

The question to ask is does the programmer of the AI have a moral obligation to change the answer, and if so, guided by whose morality?

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