Maybe that's a nice thing, I wouldn't say their values are wrong but let's call a spade a spade.
For example, Google's image search results pre-tweaking had some interesting thoughts on what constitutes a professional hairstyle, and that searches for "men" and "women" should only return light-skinned people: https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2016/apr/08/does-goog...
Does that reflect reality? No.
(I suspect there are also mostly unstated but very real concerns about these being used as child pornography, revenge porn, "show my ex brutally murdered" etc. generators.)
Chitwan Saharia, William Chan, Saurabh Saxena†, Lala Li†, Jay Whang†, Emily Denton, Seyed Kamyar Seyed Ghasemipour, Burcu Karagol Ayan, S. Sara Mahdavi, Rapha Gontijo Lopes, Tim Salimans, Jonathan Ho†, David Fleet†, Mohammad Norouzi
Unless you think white women are immune to unprofessional hairstyles, and black women incapable of them, there's a race problem illustrated here even if you think the hairstyles illustrated are fairly categorized.
Nowhere there is any precision for a preferred skin color in the query of th user.
So it sorts and gives the most average examples based on the examples that were found on the internet.
Essentially answering the query "SELECT * FROM `non-professional hairstyles` ORDER BY score DESC LIMIT 10".
It's like if you search on Google "best place for wedding night".
You may get 3 places out of 10 in Santorini, Greece.
Yes you could have an human remove these biases because you feel that Sri Lanka is the best place for a wedding, but what if there is a consensus that Santorini is really the most appraised in the forums or websites that were crawled by Google ?
Oh yeah, as a woman who grew up in a Third World country, how an AI model generates images would have deeply affected my daily struggles! /s
It's kinda insulting that they think that this would be insulting. Like "Oh no I asked the model to draw a doctor and it drew a male doctor, I guess there's no point in me pursuing medical studies" ...
You're telling me those are all the most non-professional hairstyles available? That this is a reasonable assessment? That fairly standard, well-kept, work-appropriate curly black hair is roughly equivalent to the pink-haired, three-foot-wide hairstyle that's one of the only white people in the "unprofessional" search?
Each and everyone of them is less workplace appropriate than, say, http://www.7thavenuecostumes.com/pictures/750x950/P_CC_70594... ?
It's like blaming a friend for trying to phrase things nicely, and telling them to speak headlong with zero concern for others instead. Unless you believe anyone trying to do good is being hypocrite…
I, for one, like civility.
Translation: we need to hand-tune this to not reflect reality
Seems to me that (as with any ML stuff, right?) it's reflecting the training corpus.
Futhermore, is it this thing's job to reflect reality?
the world as we (Caucasian/Asian male American woke
upper-middle class San Fransisco engineers) wish it to be
Heartfelt answer: Yes, there is some of that wishful thinking or editorializing. I don't consider it to be erasing or denying reality. This is a tool that synthesizes unreality. I don't think that such a tool should, say, refuse to synthesize an image of a female POTUS because one hasn't existed yet. This is art, not a reporting tool... and keep in mind that art not only imitates life but also influences it.
What should be the right answer then ?
You put a blonde, you offend the brown haired.
You put blue eyes, you offend the brown eyes.
etc.
Siri takes this approach for a wide range of queries.
It's a simple case of sample bias.
Work a lot on adding even more examples, in order to make the algorithms as close as possible to the "average reality".
At some point we may even ultimately reach the state that the robots even collect intelligence directly in the real world, and not on the internet (even closer to reality).
Censoring results sounds the best recipe for a dystopian world where only one view is right.
You know that race has a large effect on hair right?
If it didn't reflect reality, you wouldn't be impressed by the image of the snake made of corn.
> Oh no I asked the model to draw a doctor and it drew a male doctor, I guess there's no point in me pursuing medical studies
If you don't think this is a real thing that happens to children you're not thinking especially hard. It doesn't have to be common to be real.
I believe that's where parenting comes in. Maybe I'm too cynical but I think that the parents' job is to undo all of the harm done by society and instill in their children the "correct" values.
I say let people generate their own reality. The sooner the masses realise that ceci n'est pas une pipe , the less likely they are to be swayed by the growing un-reality created by companies like Google.
One example would be if Imagen draws a group of mostly white people when you say "draw a group of people". This doesn't reflect actual reality. Another would be if Imagen draws a group of men when you say "draw a group of doctors".
In these cases where iconographic reality differs from actual reality, hand-tuning could be used to bring it closer to the real world, not just the world as we might wish it to be!
I agree there's a problem here. But I'd state it more as "new technologies are being held to a vastly higher standard than existing ones." Imagine TV studios issuing a moratorium on any new shows that made being white (or rich) seem more normal than it was! The public might rightly expect studios to turn the dials away from the blatant biases of the past, but even if this would be beneficial the progressive and activist public is generations away from expecting a TV studio to not release shows until they're confirmed to be bias-free.
That said, Google's decision to not publish is probably less about the inequities in AI's representation of reality and more about the AI sometimes spitting out drawings that are offensive in the US, like racist caricatures.
There’s no reason to believe their model training learns the same statistics as their input dataset even. If that’s not an explicit training goal then whatever happens happens. AI isn’t magic or more correct than people.
When you do a search on a search engine, the results are biased too, but still, they shouldn't be artificially censored to fit some political views.
I asked one algorithm few minutes ago (it's called t0pp and it's free to try online, and it's quite fascinating because it's uncensored):
"What is the name of the most beautiful man on Earth ?
- He is called Brad Pitt."
==
Is it true in an objective way ? Probably not.
Is there an actual answer ? Probably yes, there is somewhere a man who scores better than the others.
Is it socially acceptable ? Probably not.
The question is:
If you interviewed 100 persons in the street, and asked the question "What is the name of the most beautiful man on Earth ?".
I'm pretty sure you'd get Brad Pitt often coming in.
Now, what about China ?
We don't have many examples there, they have no clue who is Brad Pitt probably, and there is probably someone else that is considered more beautiful by over 1B people
(t0pp tells me it's someone called "Zhu Zhu" :D )
==
Two solutions:
1) Censorship
-> Sorry there is too much bias in Western and we don't want to offend anyone, no answer, or a generic overriding human answer that is safe for advertisers, but totally useless ("the most beautiful human is you")
2) Adding more examples
-> Work on adding more examples from abroad trying to get the "average human answer".
==
I really prefer solution (2) in the core algorithms and dataset development, rather than going through (1).
(1) is more a choice to make at the stage when you are developing a virtual psychologist or a chat assistant, not when creating AI building blocks.
Far from being too cynical, this is too optimistic.
The vast majority of parents try to instill the value "do not use heroin." And yet society manages to do that harm on a large scale. There are other examples.
The quality of the evidence for this, as with almost all social science and much of psychology, is extremely low bordering on just certified opinions. I would love to understand why you think otherwise.
> Obviously there are things with much larger effects, that doesn't mean that this doesn't exist.
What a hedge. How should we estimate the size of this effect, so that we can accurately measure whether/when the self-appointed hall monitors are doing more harm than good?
In this case you’re (mostly) getting keyword matches and so it’s answering a different question than the one you asked. It would be helpful if a question answering AI gave you the question it decided to answer instead of just pretending it paid full attention to you.
It seems extremely unfair that parents of young black men should have to work extra hard to tell their kids they're not destined to be criminals. Hell, it's not fair on parents of blonde girls to tell their kids they don't have to be just dumb and pretty.
(note: I am deliberately picking bad stereotypes that are pervasive in our culture... I am not in any way suggesting those are true.)
The evidence for implicit bias is pretty weak and IIRC is better explained by people having explicit bias but lying about it when asked.
(Note: this is even worse.)
As a foreigner[], your point confused me anyway, and doing a Google for cultural stuff usually gets variable results. But I did laugh at many of the comments here https://www.reddit.com/r/TooAfraidToAsk/comments/ufy2k4/why_...
[] probably, New Zealand, although foreigner is relative
As silly as it seemed, I do think everyone is entitled to their own opinion and I respect the anti-dreadlocks girl for standing up for what she believed in even when most people were against her.
One image links to the 2015 article, "It's Ridiculous To Say Black Women's Natural Hair Is 'Unprofessional'!". The Guardian article on the Google results is from 2016.
Another image has the headline, "5 Reasons Natural Hair Should NOT be Viewed as Unprofessional - BGLH Marketplace" (2012).
Another: "What to Say When Someone Calls Your Hair Unprofessional".
Also, have you noticed how good and professional the black women in the Guardian's image search look? Most of them look like models with photos taken by professional photographers. Their hair is meticulously groomed and styled. This is not the type of photo an article would use to show "unprofessional hair". But it is the type of photo the above articles opted for.
Telling others they don’t like how others look is right near the top on the scale of offensiveness. I had a partner who had had dreads for 25 years. I’m wasn’t a huge fan of her dreads because although I like the look, hers were somewhat annoying for me (scratchy, dread babies, me getting tangled). That said, I would hope I never tell any other person how to look. Hilarious when she was working, and someone would treat her badly due to their assumptions or prejudices, only to discover to their detriment she was very senior staff!
Dreadlocks are usually called dreads in NZ. My previous link mentions that some people call them locks, which seems inapproprate to me: kind of a confusing whitewashing denial of history.
There is a difference between probably and invariably. Would it be so hard for the model to show male nurses at least some of the time?