We read the paper that forced Timnit Gebru out of Google • Hacker News Board

Re: We read the paper that forced Timnit Gebru out of Google

#681

Post by urthor » Sat, Dec 12, 2020, 8:44 AM UTC

johnzabroski wrote: post #679

sontek wrote: post #636

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think you are confusing her previous work (which was on race) and the work this article is discussing. This research paper in question was about AI and natural language processing and its carbon footprint and all that. Nothing to do with race or political agenda. Google also has done a ton of work on creating renewable datacenters, so I think they are definitely onboard with making tech have less of a carbon footpr…

This is not true. She does discuss how some countries and regions of the world use the Internet less, or not at all, and thus Transformer/BERT are training on the linguistic habits of the most affluent of the world.

It was still an extremely scattergun approach. I'm moderately familiar with NLP but nothing in that paper really had traction overall, it was more of a list of mildly bad things than anything huge.

Re: We read the paper that forced Timnit Gebru out of Google

#682

Post by wooger » Wed, Dec 16, 2020, 10:30 AM UTC

frobozz wrote: post #149

0-_-0 wrote: post #135

"...is known for coauthoring a groundbreaking paper that showed facial recognition to be less accurate at identifying women and people of color, which means its use can end up discriminating against them" Wait, isn't that the other way around? If it can't recognize people of some category then it can't be used to discriminate against them, e.g. the police can't use it to identify peaceful protesters with those charac…

If face detection defines them as not a person, then things that rely on there being a person in the field of vision will not work for them. (Like the racist soap dispenser that went viral a few years ago) If face recognition makes the old racist "they all look the same to me" declaration, then peaceful protestors get arrested for looking like criminals.

"Peaceful protestors" became a bit of a joke this year, as newsreaders stood in front of burning cars & buildings telling us a peaceful protest was going on.

Re: We read the paper that forced Timnit Gebru out of Google

#683

Post by Breza » Thu, Dec 17, 2020, 4:17 PM UTC

newsclues wrote: post #557

christophilus wrote: post #403

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I find that the average HN thread demonstrates a broader diversity of thought, and generally deeper, more critical, more scientific thought than the average Twitter feed. So it’s not surprising that Twitter would be near unanimous and HN would be more nuanced. This is one of the reasons I prefer HN to just about any other online forum.

HN is the new /.

Oh I haven't thought about that site in a long time. I used to be obsessed with it back in the day.