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.)
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 ?
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
