I've used apps that thought I was a monkey but it recognized white people just fine, I've seen racist chat bots go on about how much they love hitler and hate black people, I've saw ai generated photos that produced racist depictions. What I'm wondering is it the developers making the ai racist or is it the code itself that is racist? I don't believe that any machine has reached sentience obviously, but I have no doubt in my mind that all ai I have experienced is racist, all I ask is why?

  • mr_world [they/them]
    ·
    3 years ago

    AI is largely a Silicon Valley grift at this point. I mean it's mostly about acquiring funding for an ai venture that has to return results before the next round. There's a lot of promises being made that can't really be kept and people trying to make them happen by any means necessary. One of the things they do to bridge the gap between "functioning software that can be sold as a service" and "ai that works" is have humans do all the actual ai work. They hire cheap workers to train the ai by doing all the stuff the ai is supposed to actually do. Captcha is a good example. They teach ai to recognize street lights by having millions of people voluntarily pick out the street lights. Then google gets to sell their amazing AI that can recognize street lights. Of course google is already funded, but it's the same idea. Behind any great AI program is just people constantly training it and correcting it. Therefore the biases that exist in society come out through the AI results. To train facial recognition they feed a bunch of white faces into it and have people match the features. The people doing it have no idea they're only using such a small sample of human appearance. Nobody questions it until it's already released and non-white people notice.

    Chat bots are also trained by people who use them. 4chan has been typing racist shit into any available chat bot for years. They just repeat what's fed to them.