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Who Should Stop Unethical A.I.?

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Re: Who Should Stop Unethical A.I.?

#71

Post by slg »

refenestrator wrote: post #59
slg wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

At what point does this stop being AI's fault and start being an accurate observation of things that are society's fault? Let's say you have a racially-neutral observation of lower income, maybe disability status or a criminal rap in the past. That looks like a bad bet for a loan regardless of color, it just so happens that our society's created a statistical imbalance in those metrics.

>At what point does this stop being AI's fault and start being an accurate observation of things that are society's fault?

I mean it is never truly the "AI's fault". It is the fault of the systems that resulted in the biased data and the people who ignored that bias while still delegating the decision making to that AI allowing it to be a tool that propagates those biases. You end up with a dangerous and self-perpetuating system like this:

1. Data is biased against Black people due to historic racism.

2. AI is built of this biased data.

3. AI results in a biased system that disadvantages Black people.

4. Black people get discriminated against due to the results from the AI.

5. New data is now even more biased against Black people.

6. Go to step 1.

Re: Who Should Stop Unethical A.I.?

#72

Post by refenestrator »

slg wrote: post #71
refenestrator wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

At what point does this stop being AI's fault and start being an accurate observation of things that are society's fault? Let's say you have a racially-neutral observation of lower income, maybe disability status or a criminal rap in the past. That looks like a bad bet for a loan regardless of color, it just so happens that our society's created a statistical imbalance in those metrics.

>At what point does this stop being AI's fault and start being an accurate observation of things that are society's fault? I mean it is never truly the "AI's fault". It is the fault of the systems that resulted in the biased data and the people who ignored that bias while still delegating the decision making to that AI allowing it to be a tool that propagates those biases. You end up with a dangerous and self-perpetu…

I hear you on this but I think it crosses the line from 'ethics' to 'activism'.

The ethical concern would be, "don't build a racist AI system that assumes black people don't pay back loans". This could be mitigated by removing race and clear proxies such as zip code from training data, but it doesn't necessarily break your cycle, because the poverty and social problems are real and exist regardless of whether the AI considers race.

The anti-racist approach, on the other hand, would specifically require incorporating race so you can perform affirmative action. Maybe that's good for society, maybe there's a debate about how much and in what way you do it, who pays for it, etc. But it's left "ethics" far behind and become "politics" at that point IMO.

Re: Who Should Stop Unethical A.I.?

#73

Post by anigbrowl »

djoldman wrote: post #45
anigbrowl wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you're so curious, I suggest you do what I did and read more of their public statements and writings to satisfy your curiosity.

Thanks for your suggestion. Of the 16 linked papers/book-chapters a few were not freely accessible. Of the ones that were accessible, 3 contain the string "surveil" in the body and 1 contains it in the bibliography. None of the references were helpful unfortunately. Do you have any other links that may answer the question?

I'm not here to spoon feed you.

Re: Who Should Stop Unethical A.I.?

#74

Post by slg »

refenestrator wrote: post #72
slg wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>At what point does this stop being AI's fault and start being an accurate observation of things that are society's fault? I mean it is never truly the "AI's fault". It is the fault of the systems that resulted in the biased data and the people who ignored that bias while still delegating the decision making to that AI allowing it to be a tool that propagates those biases. You end up with a dangerous and self-perpetu…

I hear you on this but I think it crosses the line from 'ethics' to 'activism'. The ethical concern would be, "don't build a racist AI system that assumes black people don't pay back loans". This could be mitigated by removing race and clear proxies such as zip code from training data, but it doesn't necessarily break your cycle, because the poverty and social problems are real and exist regardless of whether the AI…

>This could be mitigated by removing race and clear proxies such as zip code from training data

It isn't this simple. Not all these proxies are clear. Also what are we even left with once all these proxies are removed? The zip code is hugely important when trying to establish the value of a home. Does removing all data that is potentially racially biased leave us with a model that is nearly worthless?

>But it's left "ethics" far behind and become "politics" at that point IMO.

It depends entirely on what branch of moral philosophy to which you subscribe. For a lot of people their personal politics is just applied ethics meaning not acting would be ethically wrong in their opinion.

Re: Who Should Stop Unethical A.I.?

#75

Post by mlthoughts2018 »

joshuamorton wrote: post #62
mlthoughts2018 wrote: post #6

The real problem with AI ethics and fairness is that nobody actually listens to ethicists or philosophers. Nobody takes the subject seriously. It’s just a hype vehicle to cram in whatever social justice outrage du jour that some liberal source wants to push as an agenda. I say this as a liberal who is sympathetic to most of those issues, but finds their representation in AI ethics or fairness debates to be ignorant a…

Could you cite what part of the paper you're talking about? Since it's now public[0], it's fairly easy to verify what you're talking about. The word "woke" doesn't appear in the paper. If I'm interpreting your argument correctly, I think you're criticizing either section 4.1 Size Doesn’t Guarantee Diversity, or section 4.2 Static Data/Changing Social Views. But your criticisms don't track with either of those section…

I feel my comment tracks extremely well with the sections you cite and that it takes some mental gymnastics to read exactly the link you provided and then act like my comments somehow don’t track. The original criticisms were about failure of source data for large models (eg reddit for GPT) to account for fast shifts in social activism language specifically.

The other major problematic section is on energy use and unqualified comparison of units of large model training with carbon emissions of other activities (with no attempt to account for societal value of ML model research or training, nor economies of scale as training technology democratizes it and makes it cheaper). It is similar to the incredibly specious diatribes from Stephen Diehl lately balking at the raw energy numbers of Bitcoin mining, as if those numbers mean anything or relate to any conclusions on their own.

I wrote up a lot more of my thoughts on Gebru’s bad article when it was first leaked. Here’s that comment:

- https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25314824

I also feel you are very commonly involved in lengthy downvote / flagging threads with disingenuous takes on others’ comments and deliberate unwillingness to apply charitable takes or avoid taking things out of context. I am sure from your POV you don’t feel that way and I’m not asking anyone to agree with my assessment; I have zero goal of citing things to back it up. I am just going to preemptively drop off from replying to you any further.

Re: Who Should Stop Unethical A.I.?

#76

Post by tryonenow »

slg wrote: post #36
Guest42 wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What types of models and what types of bias are you referring to?

Any model created using biased data will inherently mirror that bias unless there are active steps made to counteract this effect. For example, basically any financial evaluations of US citizens will likely result in an inherent bias against Black people due to institutional biases such as redlining that have long lasting socioeconomic and demographic repercussions. This might mean that something as simple as incorpo…

IMO the discussion is occurring under the wrong framing. The real question is what to do with discriminatory data that is reflective of reality. If certain populations are more likely to default on loans, for example, it is disingenuous to simply claim that the data is biased - the question is whether we as a society are willing to allow usage of that data.

And then the question becomes where to draw the line, since the entire purpose of such data for e.g. insurance firms is to discriminate among risk sources. So you're asking insurers (and other industries that will depend on ML) to adopt suboptimal business practices in the name of egalitarianism.

And you can't simply remove certain data points that correlate with these specific risks to alleviate bias - you're merely introducing your own bias which is more connected to the reality you wish to see than that which exists, which, again, is not operationally efficient. If a group of people is more likely to default on loans then any statistic which is correlated with said group of people will also be correlated with loan defaulting.

If you want e.g. the black community to have better access to loans, attacking ML risk models as institutionally biased is simply unscientific and completely political if African Americans are more likely to default on loans.

Re: Who Should Stop Unethical A.I.?

#77

Post by AngrySkillzz »

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.

Re: Who Should Stop Unethical A.I.?

#78

Post by JoeAltmaier »

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.

Re: Who Should Stop Unethical A.I.?

#79

Post by joshuamorton »

mlthoughts2018 wrote: post #75
joshuamorton wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Could you cite what part of the paper you're talking about? Since it's now public[0], it's fairly easy to verify what you're talking about. The word "woke" doesn't appear in the paper. If I'm interpreting your argument correctly, I think you're criticizing either section 4.1 Size Doesn’t Guarantee Diversity, or section 4.2 Static Data/Changing Social Views. But your criticisms don't track with either of those section…

I feel my comment tracks extremely well with the sections you cite and that it takes some mental gymnastics to read exactly the link you provided and then act like my comments somehow don’t track. The original criticisms were about failure of source data for large models (eg reddit for GPT) to account for fast shifts in social activism language specifically. The other major problematic section is on energy use and un…

> I feel my comment tracks extremely well with the sections you cite and that it takes some mental gymnastics to read exactly the link you provided and then act like my comments somehow don’t track. The original criticisms were about failure of source data for large models (eg reddit for GPT) to account for fast shifts in social activism language specifically.

I think this is a completely fair summary of the paper.

But you described the paper as suggesting that people are "required to agree with or accept woke vocabulary" or previously your criticism was "Nobody is required to accept “wokeness” vocabulary".

I don't see how you can justify those criticisms from the paper. They aren't there. There isn't a place where they paper says that anyone needs to use or agree with a particular kind of vocabulary.

I don't know if it's intentional or not, but the claims you're making about what the paper says just aren't in the actual document. Hence my question: where are you getting that criticism from? Where does the paper suggest that people need to agree with woke vocabulary? I think it's uncharitable for you to criticize the paper based on a mischaracterization, and so I think it's completely reasonable for me to clarify by what reasoning you came to make that criticism. Because again, despite trying I can't find an interpretation of the paper where your criticism makes sense.

I'd implore anyone else reading to look at sections 4.1 and 4.2 as well. They just simply don't say this.

Re: Who Should Stop Unethical A.I.?

#80

Post by SpicyLemonZest »

joshuamorton wrote: post #55
SpicyLemonZest wrote: post #27

Kosinski's argument seems pretty strong to me, and I really wish the article had dedicated more space to discussing it. If NeurIPS instituted the kind of ethics rules Hanna or Hecht are calling for, I don't think it would be feasible for researchers to study e.g. predictive policing algorithms. Doesn't that mean predictive policing firms would become the only source of information on the topic?

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 ethics rules in this way. If we clearly establish that suchandsuch research would be unethical at NeurIPS, I don't expect sociology conferences or think tanks would be eager to continue it, and I'm not convinced Alex Hanna would want them to.

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