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Comment by silisili | Hacker News Reader

Yeah, that Lecun argument was a really bad first impression of her from me. I guess she found out life isn't Twitter and you can't just go around telling everyone they are bad and wrong without consequences.

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She will land on her feet. There is a huge demand for ideologues willing to lobotomize ML.

“Let’s generate fake data with GANs to prevent our AI from discovering politically uncomfortable regularities!”

It’s ugly work but someone has to do it, right?

This is a rude dismissal of an entire field within machine learning and statistics (ethics, bias, and robustness).

Rude, maybe but not very. Dismissal, yes. The belief that AI should learn reality as it exists and not some ideologically purified version of it is a completely rational one, and dismissing the "work" of those so-called "ethicists" is no more problematic than dismissing the "work" of the Chinese censors who purify the Chinese internet. Indeed being dismissive of that work is to be praised, as it shouldn't exist at all.

Name the specific true facts about reality you think these models are capturing that are at risk of being 'purified' by AI ethicists. List them.

Well, read any AI bias paper. Facts about reality these models capture and which are considered problematic include stuff like "doctors are more often men and nurses are more often women" or "most people on the internet are white" or "most stuff on the internet is written in English". Basically the internet is mostly built by westerners and any facet of that gets classed as "bias" rather than being what it is: the truth.

Even trivial facts like in English "men chuckle, women giggle" has been used as examples of bias. That's not bias though, that's just how the English language works.

For example:

https://ai.googleblog.com/2020/04/a-scalable-approach-to-red...

[flagged]

What politically uncomfortable regularities are those? Please name the specific uncomfortable true facts about reality that you think these models are capturing.

"life isn't Twitter and you can't just go around telling everyone they are bad and wrong without consequences."

I wish this were true.

It is true, just not as often as we would like it to be. No “justice system” (informal here) punishes perfectly.

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