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Re:AI researcher Timnit Gebru resigns from Google by IfOnlyYouKnew on Friday December 04, 2020 @01:20PM (#25305789)
"It's December" is also a fact. He chose to mention a different one. Why, if not as an explanation / excuse for the model's behaviour?

Every practitioner already knows that these models behave according to the data they are trained on. The general public has no use for this explanation because they aren't the one deciding on the training data. So the only practical purpose is to offer some superficial causal mechanism that sounds like an explanation to that public, presented as an unchanging fact of nature, and distract from the equally true fact a biased model is only published or used iff it is trained on biased data and someone decides to go ahead and publish/use it nonetheless.

Re:AI researcher Timnit Gebru resigns from Google by kspacewalk2 on Friday December 04, 2020 @02:31PM (#25306608)
What does that mean? What is an AI researcher to do differently? Put their academic life on pause and wait for more unbiased data?
Re:AI researcher Timnit Gebru resigns from Google by visarga on Saturday December 05, 2020 @12:07PM (#25316122)
You're making a fallacy here, forcing the issue into black and white - if you mention first 'dataset bias', it must mean you 'offer some superficial causal mechanism that sounds like an explanation to that public'