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by dannyeei 1609 days ago
> We are also working hard to broaden the perspective of Responsible AI beyond western contexts.

This really grabbed my attention - I fear big tech is pushing American morals down the throat of the rest of the world. This is great that they’re noticing this and trying to correct for it!

1 comments

I don't think Google practices American morals. If it did, it wouldn't be at the center of so many controversies in America.

That said, with morals being so different from one location on the planet to the other, it's worth wondering how Google will train its "AI."

Will it pick the least restrictive set, the most restrictive set, or some kind of hodge podge? (For varying definitions of "restrictive.")

My money's on a hodge podge that doesn't make anyone happy.

>>My money's on a hodge podge that doesn't make anyone happy.

My guess is on whichever makes them the most money; seems a pretty safe bet to me.

As an American, that sounds pretty close to American morals to me.
When you're the 800-pound gorilla in the room, you will always end up in controversies. The fact that the controversy is whether or not Google is demonetizing or making harder to find trans-friendly content in the index (instead of, hypothetically, a world where the controversy was that Google were forwarding the contact information of creators of trans-friendly content to the proper authorities for "reeducation") is indicative (thank God, and may more be like them) of their America-centric morals.

You are absolutely right that for Google to serve everyone, training an AI to do so is a massive challenge. My bet is that they will train several AI and deploy them in broad domains, which is someone equivalent to how they currently operate heuristics that vary from country to country (such as the borders in Maps changing depending on where the request originates). Google seems to tend to like this approach because they think they get the best of both worlds: they satisfy the geocentric power-brokers by saying "See, we have done the right thing by you, when your people make requests they see X," while at the same time knowing that location is a bit of a fantasy online and the sufficiently savvy can get answers from other locations by causing the question to seem to originate from elsewhere in the Internet (i.e. VPN-proxying).