A new campaign — called I Am Not A Typo — is urging tech companies to fix ethnic bias in their algorithms to stop autocorrect mangling so many people's names.
Where did those dictionaries come from? Why were they chosen? Not every act of racial bias involves a burning cross or a nazi.
With an english speaking AI it’s gonna be based on a library of shitposters and snarkers - and yeah, they’re gonna overstep a lot of lines and they’re gonna have bias, conscious or otherwise. And the two sources you cite are overwhelmingly white male.
> And the two sources you cite are overwhelmingly white male
what sources??
Edit: nevermind worked it out
Yeah AI companies are being stupid using Reddit, Twitter and StackExchange, but there’s no magic fix to get more diverse AI. Would they need to pay people of underrepresented groups to write training material? Is that racist? Why should they get paid when everyone else is doing it for free?
I don’t think they were being intentionally racist when they made the dictionaries for auto-correct - the article says it only accounts for around 41% of English names - but most modern auto-correct things on phones at least seem to add words to your dictionary if you use them a lot, and they’ve probably been limited by file size requirements in the past.
It’s an example of structural/systemic/societal racism. Western industrialised civilisation has been developed and led by white men for hundreds of years - the inherent bias that comes from that often ends up discriminating against and disenfranchising non-white, non-male people in society without anyone deliberately intending it. Another way to think about it is that white men experience a higher level of privilege by default than any other group in Western society. As a white man, I have the privilege of my name being included (or being more likely to be included) by default in one of these dictionaries.
It is racism - an unthinking one, but still so.
Where did those dictionaries come from? Why were they chosen? Not every act of racial bias involves a burning cross or a nazi.
With an english speaking AI it’s gonna be based on a library of shitposters and snarkers - and yeah, they’re gonna overstep a lot of lines and they’re gonna have bias, conscious or otherwise. And the two sources you cite are overwhelmingly white male.
> And the two sources you cite are overwhelmingly white malewhat sources??Edit: nevermind worked it out
Yeah AI companies are being stupid using Reddit, Twitter and StackExchange, but there’s no magic fix to get more diverse AI. Would they need to pay people of underrepresented groups to write training material? Is that racist? Why should they get paid when everyone else is doing it for free?
I don’t think they were being intentionally racist when they made the dictionaries for auto-correct - the article says it only accounts for around 41% of English names - but most modern auto-correct things on phones at least seem to add words to your dictionary if you use them a lot, and they’ve probably been limited by file size requirements in the past.
It’s an example of structural/systemic/societal racism. Western industrialised civilisation has been developed and led by white men for hundreds of years - the inherent bias that comes from that often ends up discriminating against and disenfranchising non-white, non-male people in society without anyone deliberately intending it. Another way to think about it is that white men experience a higher level of privilege by default than any other group in Western society. As a white man, I have the privilege of my name being included (or being more likely to be included) by default in one of these dictionaries.