Full draft of Timnit Gebru's paper(old.reddit.com) |
Full draft of Timnit Gebru's paper(old.reddit.com) |
"A language model that has been trained on such data will pick up these kinds of problematic associations."
"Such data" is basically everyday, normal discourse, and some of the "problematic associations" are training that includes phrases like "woman doctor", "both genders", etc. While I get the point, this itself is a biased interpretation of discourse and would be worrisome imho to have people filtering models with their own biases vs the language as it's used by the vast majority of people.
And that's not even getting into the whole "global warming is racism" digression. Maybe it is, maybe it isn't, but it's definitely not a topic for an AI paper. Just say carbon is bad!
It seems like the goal of the paper is to make a bunch of sociological statements and impute the authority of "AI Ethics Lead Researcher" to them -- they're just political opinions, everyone has those.
[1] Values of Machine Learning, William Agnew, Abeba Birhane, Dallas Card, Ravit Dotan, Pratyusha Kalluri at Resistance AI Workshop 2020, https://drive.google.com/file/d/1tjrm3Bf1hxV8iuPSiCcM1IazITG...,
I agree with sister comment that the English history probably informs the etymology of an English phrase, especially given that the phrase was in use by the mid-17th century, before your timeframe.
https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/beyond_the_pale
Anyways, that paper scans more like a sociological research piece about data scientists, based on how they write, than an examination of how 'biased' generated speech is or is not, in case passer-bys are curious. Their conclusion is that most papers write about the neat things you can do with a new technique and don't always include a section on societal impact. It's more an absence of politics (I've got GPT-2 ready with your reply to this sentence ;)).
It's also worth taking into account that given their methods involved a bit of subjectivity, what bias did they bring. That said, it's easy to believe lots of papers were like "here's this thing i did!" without including a section on societal impact.
This doesn't seem to be true based on pretty much every source I've seen.