[eyelidlessness]

Blasting out an ML algorithm in an afternoon that causes millions of people to see wildly different representations of people depending on their race or gender seems, maybe, like a bad thing you wouldn’t want to defend?

[refenestrator]

Sure, more testing would be better, but nobody cares how many landscape shots it messed up, right?

Years ago reddit was, IIRC, not very staffed at all compared to their traffic. It's a pretty privileged take to say they should have done expensive QA entirely around your particular things that you care about.

[eyelidlessness]

But that’s the problem. The entire premise of these algorithms is based around what you (or the developers producing it) care about. It’s the common thread between image crops preferring white faces and women’s breasts, and automated cars preferring dead black pedestrians over vehicle collisions.

If you don’t have the capacity to use new technologies without increasing harm, maybe you don’t have the capacity to use them.

[refenestrator]

No, I'm positing the premise that it was shipped with an absolute minimum of QA that didn't approach the level of trying to build 'inclusive' reference sets, on the cheap. It wasn't about caring in terms of priority of what was tested, it was about NOT caring that much in any direction and shipping it.

And it was a naive image cropping algorithm, years ago, and not making use of any sophisticated 'new technologies'. The beauty of the algorithm is that it was a simple function that could have been written in 1975 and required no training, deep learning or any of that. If you want to talk self-driving cars, you've got a much more relevant measure of harm and I'm right there with you.

As it is, I'd say there's a disconnect between where you and those years-ago shoestring developers stand on Maslow's hierarchy of needs. They were being scrappy with limited resources, and you're mad at them for not having an amount of QA that would have seemed unbelievable to them under their resource constraints.

[eyelidlessness]

> No, I'm positing the premise that it was shipped with an absolute minimum of QA that didn't approach the level of trying to build 'inclusive' reference sets, on the cheap. It wasn't about caring in terms of priority of what was tested, it was about NOT caring that much in any direction and shipping it.

Right. I’m saying that not caring is the problem. We mostly agree on the facts. I’m objecting to not caring as an acceptable position.

We’re not talking about shoestring developers. We’re talking about platforms that millions of people including heads of state use to affect billions of people’s lives.

[refenestrator]

> We’re not talking about shoestring developers. We’re talking about platforms that millions of people including heads of state use to affect billions of people’s lives.

Jedberg was >5 years ago, maybe closer to 10 for this algorithm. They were relatively shoestring compared to now, and especially compared to current-day FAANG.

[eyelidlessness]

Well I don't see any sense continuing this discussion, since you just keep refusing to engage with the harm done by doing something without caring about its impact.

[jtbayly]

Machine learning? It’s not in my book.