Hacker News Reader

Comment by emteycz | Hacker News Reader

I can't understand how people can keep shouting "it's not AI, it's not really thinking" and then go and label a bunch of numerical weights to be "racist".

View on HN

"Racially biased" works, racist just gets more clicks

The AI is racially biased. The community that doesn't see racial bias in AI as a problem and only ever mocks and ridicules the premise because they can't take it seriously is racist.

Or, the community knows that models will always have biases, and so the community makes its software work around that limitation by other means than modifying the model, because that might not be possible at all.

The community that actually understands this as a problem and attempts to resolveit is not the community to which I was referring.

I don't think AI is alive.

On the other hand I'd be happy calling, laws, customs, organizations, religious beliefs, and various other things and conclusions drawn from statistics 'racist' without them being living, thinking beings.

I see comments like this all the time on these sorts of articles, and I have two criticisms:

First, although "AI exhibits racial bias due to biased training data" is far more accurate, I think it's perfectly acceptable to condense that to "AI is racist". Especially in the headline of an article that goes on to explain the issue in detail.

Second, I would say that even racist humans are racist because of bad training data, so if we're fine calling people racist, why not AI?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com