I am honestly disappointed to see this kind of response at the top of comments here. Every time we have some sort of social issue come up people here come in to pick apart the person involved, and I think it’s one of the bigger reasons why some maintain a generally negative view of Hacker News. Can you imagine being Timnit and stopping by this thread, where the top comment, in colorful language, reduces you to a social activist fraud? A comment coming from someone who hasn’t even read the full paper? One that ignores the job you were hiring to do (which seems precisely to draw out the social issues of AI) and lambasts it?
At you the commenter yourself: you seem to be exceptionally harsh on her based on the most minimal information that you’ve purposes to fit your claim of this being “useless things that we shouldn’t care about”. Do you know how much energy goes into training a model? I certain didn’t. Do you think that showing that AI is picking up discriminatory language is something worth looking into? I certainly think having someone look into it would be useful, yes. And Google apparently thought so too. Claiming that these things are idiotic and attacking the author of this paper for bad faith and censure is…very extreme.