Comment by kosh2
1 year ago
If you look at attempts to actively rewrite history, they have to because a hypothetical model trained only on facts would produce results that they won't like
1 year ago
If you look at attempts to actively rewrite history, they have to because a hypothetical model trained only on facts would produce results that they won't like
Models aren't trained on pure "facts" though - they're trained on a dataset of artifacts that reflect today's and yesterday's biases from the world that created them.
If you trained a model purely on past history, it would see a 1:1 correlation between "US President" and "man" and decide that women cannot be President. That's factually incorrect, and it's not "rewriting history" to tune models so they know the difference between what's happened so far and what's allowable, or possible in a just world.
Maybe it would have the Constitution thrown in there also and figure out that "women cannot be President" is untrue? Sort of like in the real world.
Because otherwise, I guess I agree, you only know that you are taught and presented; AI especially because there is no intelligence in it whatsoever, only endless if blocks tuned for correlation.
That is not my point. Even if we had a model that could portray reality as objective as possible, a lot of people wouldn't like that and be actually offended by it.
This has also been going on a lot in the "representation" discourse.
A bohemian village 500 years ago would have been 100% white in almost all circumstances. Surgents would be male. Telephone scammers Indian and so on.
But in many ways, simply showing reality is not only not wanted but even offensive. What has to be shown is an idealized version of reality that we want to achieve and that is "more diversity". And what is maximum diversity? Zero white people.
> If you trained a model purely on past history, it would see a 1:1 correlation between "US President" and "man" and decide that women cannot be President.
Why would you think that? You and me also know the history but also realize that a woman can be president.
I think a model that is historically 100% accurate demographically, while also reflecting current or maybe even slight optimism about demographic balance when giving results not bound to a particular historical period, would be acceptable to the vast majority of people, especially if that can be rigorously shown through statistical sampling.