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@timnitGebru identified a huge problem w/artificial intelligence today: English text generators (language models) are built using online text from sources like Twitter. But there's so much abuse towards women, people of color & queer people on Twitter. So we participate less. https://twitter.com/timnitgebru/status/1381366153109508097
Posters who are sexist, racist, or homophobic and write tweets that display these biases are enabled to tweet more. These tweets get fed into English text generators (like Google's GPT-3 generator) & produce sexist, racist, and homophobic text that is difficult to moderate.
This is a big AI problem in the tech industry because some companies want to pretend that this problem doesn't exist, and that English text generators like Google's GPT-3 generator are incapable of showing bias. (This article investigates GPT-3:
https://towardsdatascience.com/is-gpt-3-islamophobic-be13c2c6954f)
https://towardsdatascience.com/is-gpt-3-islamophobic-be13c2c6954f)
Gebru and her co-authors show that English text generators need human curation that is culturally & historically sensitive: http://faculty.washington.edu/ebender/papers/Stochastic_Parrots.pdf
I personally believe that the tech industry pretends this problem doesn't exist because it would cost money & shift priorities.
I personally believe that the tech industry pretends this problem doesn't exist because it would cost money & shift priorities.
No matter what the intent is of tech companies, the result is the same: English text generators like GPT-3 are not getting less racist, sexist, homophobic from being exposed to more data from online interactions like tweets--the interactions themselves encode societal biases.
Gebru and her co-authors push AI research to focus on data curation & responsibility instead of vacuuming all data on the internet. Its being selective about what you choose--like a librarian. This has cultural ramifications that tech companies don't want responsibility for.
There were dire consequences for Gebru & her fellow researchers at Google for publishing "On the Dangers of Stochastic Parrots". Gebru & Margaret Mitchell were fired from Google. Google launched a campaign against them after they spoke up: https://www.theverge.com/22309962/timnit-gebru-google-harassment-campaign-jeff-dean
Google's harsh overreaction to this paper has rocked Google, the tech industry, artificial intelligence research, academia, & people of color in tech. It feels like the era of AI exuberance that we were in during the 2010s is over & now we're looking to rebuild from the wreckage.
Thanks everyone for the likes and retweets! I like to try to explain current tech industry & computer science problems in an accessible way, and it makes me happy to see that this thread is accomplishing that!
