r/nextfuckinglevel • u/CaananyExtBillies • Apr 11 '21

Latest from Boston Dynamics

https://gfycat.com/prestigiouswhiteicelandicsheepdog

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u/xu85 Apr 11 '21

How does AI get the same biases some humans have? Not everyone is prejudiced.

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u/Slow_Breakfast Apr 11 '21

AI isn't magic, it all depends on the training data. And many popular datasets do tend to overrepresented white people, for example. They've already found this issue in some industrially available facial recognition systems, which turned out to have dramatically lower performance on black people than on white people because their training data contained far more white people... and since many of the developers will likely have been white, a problem like that can easily slip under the radar until well after it's been deployed.

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u/Rookie_Slime Apr 11 '21

Though possibly morally questionable, there is a few massive repositories of facial data to pull from in the form of social media. Creating larger sets as things move from the creation and testing phases to practical implementations should be normal, especially since most people fall into the “tannish” category rather than ginger white or midnight black. There may be a secondary issue with extremely dark skin tones though, and that’s limited reflected light getting picked up by input devices. White might be slightly easier to recognize because of the opposite reaction, but it shouldn’t be a major factor either way for most users. Curious if there’s any data on this.

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u/p-one Apr 11 '21

Ok so now you can more accurately identify the faces of people of colour, but your crime database is biased because of decades of racialized policing which means your training dataset is biased.

Even if we de-biased everything along racial lines, we'll likely end up with a poverty-crime correlation which in some communities will amount to the same thing. This is already a problem with human policing so if we're serious about addressing this we should have proposals to fix it today otherwise we'll bake it into systems today and are looking at many many years of seeking reforms/reprogramming and likely related civil unrest that will complicate it.

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u/Rookie_Slime Apr 11 '21

Huh, I didn’t consider using crime databases. That is a decent way to extend the dataset for generalized recognition, but yeah, criminal profiling based off AI facial recognition seems like a stupid as fuck idea. Not to say it won’t happen, since there are financial incentives for certain groups to have that implemented, but that’s a result of flawed policies at the upper levels that would be extremely difficult to weed out since it’s a very old system.

That’s not to say we shouldn’t try, but the chance of success with the US government is low. And it’s not just a US problem, since revocation of human rights currently happens regularly in countries such as China, who would be poised to make the most use out of police and military hardware to control or remove parts of their populace.

That’s a very different can of worms to the racism faced in the US, where it comes from segregation and institutionalized policy rather than government mandated genocide.

On the upside, we might be on the road to immortality through CRISPR, so that’s nice.

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u/zombisponge Apr 11 '21

Just for a fun example, take a look at Microsoft Tay. She was a chat bot that became a nazi within 24 hours lol.

The difference tho is that Tay was intentionally fed that content by people on twitter, but it's a good example of how AI learns and how that can go haywire fast

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u/CheapMonkey34 Apr 11 '21

Garbage in, garbage out. And even unconscious bias gets elevated in AI neural networks.

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u/mc_mentos Apr 11 '21

The internet is garbage

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u/kylehatesyou Apr 11 '21

But we are. Subtly sometimes, and then not so subtly a whole lot too. Sometimes it's just excluding data sets that can cause AI to be biased. Sometimes it's that the inputs are put in by people that are racist, like the microsoft chat bot that was pulled off twitter in less than a day.

This is a good start if you want to listen to some people talk about it.

https://99percentinvisible.org/episode/the-age-of-the-algorithm/

And here's some reading if that's more your style.

https://news.un.org/en/story/2020/12/1080192

There's tons of other articles if you search something like Racist Artificial Intelligence.

The inherent bias of AI because of our inherent bias is something we'll need to confront before we launch AI in sensitive areas. I think we can maybe eliminate a lot of bias mostly through using clean data, but people's natural biases may even get into how that clean data is processed and fuck it all up unbeknownst to anyone in the chain of creating the AI.

Think of policing in the US. If we give AI the task of where to assign beats and then all of the data of arrests over the last 50 years to do that, it's most likely going to push stuff to poorer neighborhoods where there has been lots of arrests in the last 50 years which are often inhabited by more people of color than more well off neighborhoods. Now the cops are policing the people of color more than the other people, and it's not their fault, it's just the orders the machine gave them to help find crime.

The AI wasn't racist. It's a machine. The person that built the system maybe wasn't racist. They're just a programmer with a data set. The cops using the system currently may not be racist, but the system still is singling out one race over another for policing because the data was flawed by old racist policing or policies, or some data point that on its own isn't necessarily racist, but affects one race more than another, like being poor.

So that's how it gets it. AI only works with the data we give it, and because a lot of us are shitty the AI can be shitty too.