[mschuster91]

Searching for "child" or "house" will yield what has been classified as such in training - and searching for Japanese or Thai labels will do the same. No surprise there, if the labels don't get normalized before training.

And normally, that's harmless - as you said, you'd expect to see an AI finding pictures of houses in the region/culture you are searching it. But in a multi-cultural/multi-ethnic society, searching for "people" and showing up only what is considered the "majority" has a whole different lot of ethical implications.

Identifying and ideally remediating such issues is why ethics research is so sorely needed.

[Blikkentrekker]

> And normally, that's harmless - as you said, you'd expect to see an AI finding pictures of houses in the region/culture you are searching it.

I am not actually; I am searching for “huis”, not “Nederlands huis”; I'd expect the result I obtain from the former with the latter.

I'd actually expect “house” and “huis” to reveal similar results from a good search engine. Obviously this is not easily possible with how it is trained with corpora in a specific language, but from usability I think this is undesirable, if I specifically want Dutch houses I can always add that term as a specification; there is no way to simply search for houses, wherever they might be, in Dutch, or English, or Thai, or any other language.

That is to say, I'm not arguing that there is no problem; I'm arguing that the problem is highly dependent upon location, and that he article should not take such a U.S.A.-centric stance and act as though the reset of the world not exist.

[b9a2cab5]

No, remediating such issues (only predicting the maximum likelihood class in the dataset) is a problem of _machine learning and optimization_ research, not ethics research. There is nothing an ethicist can do to solve this problem. It is easy to point out problems with existing AI and write a bunch of papers to get yourself tenure. It is very hard to fundamentally advance our understanding of deep learning models past a fancy maximum likelihood estimation problem.

[mschuster91]

> _machine learning and optimization_ research

Ethics education is (unfortunately) not really seen as necessary across the tech field, which is why ethics researchers need to be part of at all stages of AI development.

And for what it's worth, ethics researchers should be part of all technology development - the "racist soap dispenser" should have been more than enough proof of how even a very simple, innocent product can contribute to ethnic discrimination.