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Comment by dsr_ | Hacker News Reader

The process of gathering evidence after the suit has started is called discovery.

There are three major kinds of evidence that would be useful here. Most useful but least likely: email inside the company in which someone says "make sure that this doesn't select too many people with disabilities" or "it's fine that the system isn't selecting people with disabilities, carry on".

Useful and very likely: prima facie evidence that the software doesn't make necessary reasonable accomodations - a video captcha without an audio alternative, things like that.

Fairly useful and of moderate likelihood: statistical evidence that whatever the company said or did, it has the effect of unfairly rejecting applicants with disabilities.

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And one could go a step further: run the software itself and show that it discriminates. One doesn't just have to look at past performance of the software; it can be fed inputs tailored to bring out discriminatory performance. In this way software is more dangerous to the defendant than manual hiring practices; you can't do the same thing to an employee making hiring decisions.

How would you make sure that the supplied version has the same weights as the production version? And wouldn't the weights and architecture be refined over time anyway?

> How would you make sure that the supplied version has the same weights as the production version?

You just run the same software (with the same state database, if applicable).

Oh wait, I forgot, nobody knows or cares what software they're running. As long as the website is pretty and we can outsource the sysop burden, well then, who needs representative testing or the ability to audit?

Perjury laws. Once a judge has commanded you to give the same AI, you either give the same AI, or truthfully explain that you can't. Any deviation from that and everyone complicit is risking jail time, not just money.

"this is the June 2020 version, this is the current version, we have no back ups in between" is acceptable if true. Destroying or omitting an existing version is not.

Not that not having backups is something that you can sue the company for as an investor. If you say we have the June 2020 version, but not the july one you asked for you are fine, (it is reasonable to have save daily backups for a month, monthly backups for a year, and then yearly backups). Though even then I might be able to sue you for not having version control of the code.

True, but if you really never had it, that's money, not jail time.

If a non-hired employee brings a criminal action, this may matter.

For a civil action, the burden of proof is "preponderance of evidence," which is a much lower standard than "beyond a reasonable doubt." "Maybe the weights are different now" is a reasonable doubt, but in a civil case the plaintiff could respond "Can the defendant prove the weights are different? For that matter, can the defendant even explain to this court how this machine works? How can the defendant know this machine doesn't just dress up discrimination with numbers?" And then it's a bad day for the defendant to the tune of a pile of money if they don't understand the machine they use.

Don't most production NN or DLN optimize to a maximum?

Seems like the behavior becomes predictable and then you have to retrain if you see unoptimal results.

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