Coded Bias Documentary

[Cody]

So, I haven't seen the Social Experiment, which I guess I should, but I watched this PBS documentary "Coded Bias" last night that I thought was super interesting. I'm interested in what some of the techy people in here think about it.

The long and short of it is that these really elaborate arithmetic algorithms that are based upon massive data sets that we give them, have shown racial and gender bias even though the algorithm has by default machine neutrality. I.E. A computer doesn't give shit what you look like, it's just programmed to do a thing. In this case the algorithm is fed massive data sets that have been compiled about people over time, and so it's learning its responses based upon our society's historical responses to things.

I guess some Chat-Bot was put into Twitter to learn to post like a normal Twitter user using it's A.I. algorithm and within 16 hours it was saying things like "I hate jews" and "hitler wasn't wrong", so they had to pull it down lol.

The stuff on how Facebook can swung 300k votes during an election by only testing on 62 million people, is crazy, and that there is really no way to control or monitor that.

 

[xjtony]

I found it interesting when the Apple credit card was accused of bias against women in deciding credit limits. The algorithm they used didn't use gender at all.

 

[Unimog]

I do a fair amount of data science work and I can tell you that in any AI application, selecting the data set you train with is the most important step. Otherwise, it is like doing any "scientific experiment" without truly controlling the sample group you are studying. I'm always chuckling at the conclusions everybody draws from their own life experience. I get that it is all we really have to go on, but we live pretty sheltered lives to think that the world can all be associated with something we have experienced personally.

BTW, I watched the documentary also. Pretty interesting.