Re:AI researcher Timnit Gebru resigns from Google
by BlueTemplar on Friday December 04, 2020 @02:08AM
(#25299804)
One of the huge questions is : who takes responsibility for the issues with the black box learning systems ?
In France, since you have to be able to explain in plain words the algorithm that was used to help to make an administrative decision, it indirectly makes these black box learning systems illegal.
(And yet they probably already have been used by the police?)
Now, the naive response is that the engineer that implemented a system should take responsibility for any harm done by the system - and I guess that if these engineers could lose their license to use a computer and face jail time, they might also start to put pressure upstream on researchers to provide better systems ?
Dataset bias is only one way this occurs, though. Even if you include more colored faces, you still may be taking pictures with a camera that doesn't capture as much contrast. Or even if you retrain, you may have chosen model structure to optimize behavior in a biased dataset. Or... if you're considering the cost of misidentification by a facial recognition system used by, say, police, you need to be sure that you take a perspective that applies to society as a whole and not to your own interactions with police.
It's perfectly reasonable to say "AI is worsening the experience of minorities in various ways" and to differ with responses that assume with slight additional care in curating datasets that the problem will be completely solved.