Despite advancements in AI, new research reveals that large language models continue to perpetuate harmful racial biases, particularly against speakers of African American English.
While it may be obvious to you, most people don't have the data literacy to understand this, let alone use this information to decide where it can/should be implemented and how to counteract the baked in bias. Unfortunately, as is mentioned in the article, people believe the problem is going away when it is not.
The real problem are implicit biases. Like the kind of discrimination that a reasonable user of a system can't even see. How are you supposed to know, that applicants from "bad" neighborhoods are rejected at a higher rate, if the system is presented to you as objective? And since AI models don't really explain how they got to a solution, you can't even audit them.
We're like teenaged trailer trash parents who just gave birth to a genius at the trailer park where we're all dysfunctional alcoholics and meth addicts ...
... now we're acting surprised that our genius baby talks like an idiot after listening to us for ten years.
Shit in, shit out. That’s AI. You can’t guarantee a single thing it says is true, and you have to play whack-a-mole forever to get it to behave. Imagine knowing this and still investing time and money in it. We could be investing that in education and making the human experience better, but instead we’re stuck watching capitalists harness it to replace people, and shove half-baked ideas out the door as finished products.
Look, I love tech. I’ve worked in tech for 20 years. I’ve built apps that use AI. It’s the one tech that I despise watching capitalists have control of. It’s just chatbots all the way down that don’t know what they’re regurgitating, and eventually they’re going to be vacuuming up nothing but other AI content. That is going to be the future. Just bots talking to other bots. Everything completely devoid of humanity.
"On two occasions I have been asked, – "Pray, Mr. Babbage, if you put into the machine wrong figures, will the right answers come out?" ... I am not able rightly to apprehend the kind of confusion of ideas that could provoke such a question."