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1. 6gvONx+(OP)[view] [source] 2022-05-23 22:12:39
It’s wild to me that the HN consensus is so often that 1) discourse around the internet is terrible, it’s full of spam and crap, and the internet is an awful unrepresentative snapshot of human existence, and 2) the biases of general-internet-training-data are fine in ML models because it just reflects real life.
replies(3): >>astran+K2 >>nullc+g4 >>colord+o6
2. astran+K2[view] [source] 2022-05-23 22:29:43
>>6gvONx+(OP)
The bias on HN is that people who prioritize being nice, or may possibly have humanities degrees or be ultra-libs from SF, are wrong because the correct answer would be cynical and cold-heartedly mechanical.

Other STEM adjacent communities feel similarly but I don’t get it from actual in person engineers much.

replies(1): >>sineno+vq
3. nullc+g4[view] [source] 2022-05-23 22:39:57
>>6gvONx+(OP)
It's wild to me that you'd say that. The people complaining (1) aren't following it up with "so we should make sure to restrict the public from internet access entirely". -- that's what would be required to make your juxtaposition make sense.

Moreover, the model doing things like exclusively producing white people when asked to create images of people home brewing beer is "biased" but it's a bias that presumably reflects reality (or at least the internet), if not the reality we'd prefer. Bias means more than "spam and crap", in the ML community bias can also simply mean _accurately_ modeling the underlying distribution when reality falls short of the author's hopes.

For example, if you're interested in learning about what home brewing is the fact that it uses white people would be at least a little unfortunate since there is nothing inherently white and some home brewers aren't white. But if, instead, you wanted to just generate typical home brewing images doing anything but would generate conspicuously unrepresentative images.

But even ignoring the part of the biases which are debatable or of application-specific impact, saying something is unfortunate and saying people should be denied access are entirely different things.

I'll happily delete this comment if you can bring to my attention a single person who has suggested that we lose access to the internet because of spam and crap who has also argued that the release of an internet-biased ML model shouldn't be withheld.

4. colord+o6[view] [source] 2022-05-23 22:54:57
>>6gvONx+(OP)
Why is it wild? How is it contradictory?
replies(1): >>6gvONx+z9
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5. 6gvONx+z9[view] [source] [discussion] 2022-05-23 23:19:44
>>colord+o6
If these models spit out the data they were trained on and the training data isn’t representative of reality, then they won’t spit out content that’s representative of reality either.

So people shouldn’t say ‘these concerns are just woke people doing dumb woke stuff, but the model is just reflecting reality.’

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6. sineno+vq[view] [source] [discussion] 2022-05-24 01:45:57
>>astran+K2
Being nice is alright, but why is it that this fundamental drive is so often an uninspiring explanation behind yet another incursion towards one's individual freedom, even if exercising said freedom doesn't bring any real harm to anyone involved?

Maybe the engineers conclude correctly that voicing this concern without the veil of anonymity will do nothing good to their humble livelihood, and thus you don't hear it from them in person.

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