Am I wrong in thinking that "echo the biases they're fed" is a pretty complete, concise description for what "AI"/ML systems are supposed to do?
For example, we're generally not allowed to discriminate based on gender, but even without a gender field, ML will happily imply a gender out of its firehose of other data, and discriminate based on it anyway.
"AI finds that employees are less likely to stay at the company if their names end in 'a' and they score higher on 'cultivation' rubrics" This same AI then recommends hiring applicant 2 over applicant 1. Is this allowable?
Bear in mind "bias" is just a perjorative for "generalisation" or alternatively "lesson learned". AI algorithms are good at detecting patterns in data and bad at being politically correct. This is not a flaw of the algorithms, it's a flaw in people who can't accept measured reality and go into denial.
So an AI trying to hire programmers discriminates against female sounding names, because it's learned that this is correlated with success? Apply it to hiring nurses or primary school teachers and it'll probably do the opposite. This is only "bias" if you start from ideologically driven blank slate assumptions. Otherwise it's just common sense.
Instead of someone drilling into your head that your initials = good, and others = bad via your environment, it happens through natural processes.
Most biases are just pattern matching which is necessary for efficient memory references and power quick on-the-spot judgements/decisions we need to make. People make too much of a big deal out of stereotypes like it's evil to hold them even though it's a basic function of the brain. It's entirely possible without constant vigilance to make misjudgements based on that but it will still happen to everyone, even the most socially aware people.
For example, imagine that you wanted to train an algorithm to distinguish photos of dogs from photos humans. So you collect a bunch of photos of both dogs and humans and use them to train a classifier. You do all the proper cross-validation, bootstrapping, etc. to ensure that you are not overfitting, and you get really good results. Then, looking at the mis-classifications, you notice something: all the photos that are taken looking at an angle down toward the ground are classified as dog photos, and all the photos taken looking straight ahead are classified as human photos. It turns out that in your training set, most of the dog photos are taken at a downward angle while must of the human photos are taken facing straight ahead, because humans are taller than dogs, and your machine learning algorithm identified this feature as the most reliable way to distinguish the two groups of photos in your training set.
In this hypothetical example, no overfitting occurred. The difference in photo angles is a real difference in the training sets that you provided to the algorithm, and the algorithm did its job and correctly identified this difference between the two groups of photos as a reliable predictor. The problem is that your training set has a variable (photo angle) that is highly correlated with what you want to classify (species). This is considered an unwanted bias (and not a reliable indicator) because the correlation is caused by the means of data collection (most photos are taken from human head height) and has nothing to do with the subject of the photos.
(Though maybe the term as used in industry is less strict.)
It would be like if your car was driving in circles and you called a mechanic to fix your steering, and they told you that the actual problem was that both right wheels were missing. That's not a steering problem, and no repair to the steering system will fix it. The only fix is to put new wheels on.
When AI makes a decision, right now, people only uses the probability output. Hiring A has .6 probability while hiring B has .4. then we will hire A instead of B. However, if we consider the confidence intervals, the decision might not be that clear. Say +/- .5 to hire A but .2 to hire B. If exploration is considered too, very likely that we will give B a chance.
AI is in the realm of probabilistic decision making, while normal people don't follow. The bias is not from the training side. It's the decision making process incorporating AI should change.
...which means that whether a model is "biased" depends on where and how it's applied. This is an important point that is missing from most discussions, articles and even research papers on the so-called "AI ethics".
If the biases are consistent with other real-world data, then it's not overfitting.
If the results are odious to us, it should be impetus to critically analyze not only the AI/ML systems, but also the underlying assumptions that they're built on. Instead, developers become defensive and cage-y about their processes.
If you don't want systems to have disparate impact, you have to be adamant about it in your design. If you think society is better off with systems that reflect preexisting biases, then fine, but be ready for the backlash.
At the end of the day, it really is up to what humans want to do with themselves. It's an opportunity to be truer to our intent, not a bug to be covered up.
When you say unconscious bias, you are kind of implying that the model learns something that is false. But more often it's the case that the model learns something true that we don't want it to learn. That's what makes the problem so hard, you are trying to hide the truth from a system you only half-understand processing data you only half-understand. There is a big risk the truth slips through the cracks if you aren't careful.
It's more that the model learns something that is undesirable. It could be the case, for example, that the true thing that the AI learns is that your resume screening process tends to exclude women. This is true, sure, but it could lead to the undesirable outcome where the presence of a female name on a resume might be weighted heavily against the candidate.
I agree that this process is one of resolving blind spots, but I disagree that the blind spots are simply areas devoid of light. AI/ML systems are frequently employed to augment or stand in for human perception, which is known to be necessarily incomplete with respect to reality. In other words, they can learn things that seem true to us but that are false from another perspective, or undesirable once exposed. What's exciting about them is that they provide an opportunity to interrogate the flaws in our individual perception with a systematized observation and analysis, in a much more sophisticated manner than in the past. But fulfilling that potential requires humility.
https://www.wired.com/story/best-algorithms-struggle-recogni...
Their failure was not just in lacking diverse training sets, but diverse QA, or at least QA looking for those blindspots which eventually became evident.
So, correct, it's not as simple as having "sufficient" data.
Your expectation was the same one they had, and it was wrong, which is the crux of the issue.
If you asked the developers of the facial recognition library, "does your software have problems with very low contrast conditions" they'd surely have answered yes. Fully conscious of the issue but, that's software. It's hard to get everything right 100% of the time.
Do you have a source for data set mis-labelings being a problem?
However, ML is often sold as a solution for generating outcomes, not for finding truths, wether they be true or false.
The distinction is huge.
No matter what humans do, they will reap what they sow. Consequences and outcome matter more than "truth" (which may be in the eye and competence of the beholder).
What people think they should be is far, far more complicated and nebulous. I'm not sure I fully understand, but people have been fed a lot of nonsense about AI systems, from Deep Blue to Watson to AlphaGo, etc, etc, showing them as being very powerful in limited domains, and extrapolating that out into overestimations of what they could do.
The other main problem is that people seem to think that these AI systems will be a complete replacement for human thought and decision-making, which, frankly, knowing even a little about how the sausage of software is made, is completely terrifying.
The scary part is, they can do so on a different level than your average human. Pouring over larger sets of data quickly, than you or I have time to consume in our entire lives.
The largest issue, however, is that an AI can find and shed light on dislikable realities of the world.
Racism, sexism, culturism, opposing political opinions... Perspectives that are not "PC" still exist and permeate the digital world along with the physical one. Creating unbiased data is, imo, impossible, as I am also biased, and so are you. I don't know what unbiased data is.
I can certainly say that I have held racist, sexist, religious, and political views at various stages of my life - based on small sample set data, and biased trainers. I have grown a better understanding and no longer hold many of the naive beliefs that I held when I was younger, and will continue to realize how ignorant I am as I live.
The same process will probably happen for any AI.
What about just learning based on the entire web?
I think you're using the word "unbiased" to mean "heavily adjusted for US centric views on racism and sexism" which isn't what the word really means.
If you train an AI on everything written - all books, all web pages, all newspaper articles etc ... a not impossible task these days - then you can argue you're as close to bias free as possible.
However a small number of AI researchers don't like the results they get when they do this, because the AI learns the world that truly exists instead of the one they wish would exist. But that's not a bug in the software. It's a bug in the researchers.
Becoming less ignorant is a life-long process, as far as I can tell.
I'm just somewhat more aware of my capacity to over-generalize based on my individual experiences, and allow biases to settle in my subconscious in the form of racism, sexism, ageism, or what have you. I try to find where I have internalized these thoughts so I can do a little internal reforming. I also pay a lot more attention to "_______ is/are _______" statements, as they are almost always over-generalizations.
Being aware of this mental mechanism doesn't really stop me from doing it though. I know I'll tend to cluster experiences to create generalizations indefinitely, as it seems to be an evolved trait (makes sense for survival reasons, to assume the worst until you find evidence otherwise) - even though it's not perfect.
What we should be aiming for instead is not the total lack of bias (an impossibility if you are to learn anything at all from the data), but _explainability_. A system must be able to show me the set of statistics that led to a particular decision. I.e. women in Los Angeles area are known to be much safer drivers according to this subset of data, so we offer a lower insurance rate to women in Los Angeles area, to use just one hypothetical example. Such systems are a rarity nowadays, and research into them is relatively sparse.
It seems a lot of people don't realize that there's likely a large disconnect between what people think they're training an AI to do and what they're actually training it to do.
If they're lucky, the two are close enough that the learning program will be useful for what was hoped, and if they're unlucky it will look like it's useful and correct but will include behavior learned from the training data that was not predicted and which taints the result.
IE, if you train an AI with what you think is unbiased data but which includes a subtle bias, then the results you get from it may be biased... and the bias may be so subtle it's undetectable except by another AI, which is a problem if you assume that since your training data was unbiased, your AI must be unbiased.
Putting it another way... garbage in, garbage out.
If ML is trained on biased data where an optimality exists only at an unbiased solution (think a shaped reward function in RL to disincentivize class bias or something similar), then no, the ML is most certainly not supposed to echo the bias they've been fed.
On the other hand, if an optimal solution to the ML optimization problem exists at a biased solution, ex. a naive prediction of if a nurse is a man or a woman, then yeah, we would say that it was supposed to echo the bias.
All too often I feel people forget that ML is just an optimization problem. What you're trying to optimize really matters - generalizing about all ML without talking about the optimization problem in question is pointless.