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Google's Sentiment Analyzer Thinks Being Gay Is Bad (vice.com)
gooddogsgotoheaven shares a report from Motherboard: In July 2016, Google announced the public beta launch of a new machine learning application program interface (API), called the Cloud Natural Language API. It allows developers to incorporate Google's deep learning models into their own applications. As the company said in its announcement of the API, it lets you "easily reveal the structure and meaning of your text in a variety of languages." In addition to entity recognition (deciphering what's being talked about in a text) and syntax analysis (parsing the structure of that text), the API included a sentiment analyzer to allow programs to determine the degree to which sentences expressed a negative or positive sentiment, on a scale of -1 to 1. The problem is the API labels sentences about religious and ethnic minorities as negative -- indicating it's inherently biased. For example, it labels both being a Jew and being a homosexual as negative. A Google spokesperson issued the following statement in response to Motherboard's request for comment: "We dedicate a lot of efforts to making sure the NLP API avoids bias, but we don't always get it right. This is an example of one of those times, and we are sorry. We take this seriously and are working on improving our models. We will correct this specific case, and, more broadly, building more inclusive algorithms is crucial to bringing the benefits of machine learning to everyone."
If you've already decided that being homosexual (or a Jew, or a redhead, or a lefty, you name it) must not be deemed negative, why do you need analysis at all?
Anyway, here is a constructive suggestion: define more precisely what "negative" is. (Things like this are sorely needed IRL too, where people e.g. routinely use statistical norm as an argument in ethical discussions.)
They keep 'rediscovering' this every few months. Why is this a story?
The reality of it is, the algorithm is functioning as expected. It is quantifying sentiments that actually exist in our society. GIGO
Brad: You tricked me, I wouldn't have...I' ve never never...never... Frank: Oh Yes yes, I know...but it isn't all bad, is it?
Guns don't kill people; Physics kills people! - John Lithgow as Dick Solomon on Third Rock From The Sun
It's almost like objective, quantifiable reality and feel-good political correctness are fundamentally at odds with each other.
A lot of people rage over being called out for their bigoted or homophobic remarks. Freedom of speech does not equal freedom from the negative consequences of said speech. Fixed it for you. People rage over the consequences of being an insensitive jerk.
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Nobody at Google goes through a dictionary choosing the sentiment of words; it's the context of word usage out in the world that trains these models. So it's not Google's fault, it's our fault, if blame is to be laid.
As long as it's neither your dick or ass, how's it your business? Or do you make other guys dicks and asses your business?
That's SO gay, dude!
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Their api is trying to be too universal and monolithic.
Gay is neither good or bad. Gay is just a label. Google should be able to recognize that 'gay' means one thing when a bigot uses it, but it should also recognize that 'gay' means something else when others use it.
In other words, the meaning of words should be heavily weighed on the training data of the individual listening/reading and on the training data of the individual speaking/writing.
So many of us already use "gay" and "jew" as derogatory terms. Is it any wonder that Google's NLP picked up on that? What source do you think it learned from?
Biologically speaking homosexuality is bad for the replication of any species in it's most basic form
Well, no.
Being homosexual might be bad for the replication of the individual (since it reduces the individual's chances of having offspring), but it doesn't necessarily follow that it's therefore also bad for the species.
Consider that childless homosexuals, not being burdened by the task of having to care for children of their own, will likely therefore have extra time and resources available to help protect and care for the children of child-bearing couples in their family or community, thus improving the children's (and therefore the species') chances of surviving. Given the huge time investment that human children require, increasing a child's odds of survival to adulthood is a huge win.
And if you think that sort of dynamic is uncommon in nature, consider that fact that 99% of bees are sterile and play no role in the reproduction of their hive, except to gather food and protect the queen and the drones who do handle the reproduction.
Specialization and division of labor is one of the things human civilization is based on; there's no reason it can't be applied to reproduction as well.
I don't care if it's 90,000 hectares. That lake was not my doing.
Reading the ridiculous comment from the google spokesperson falling all over themselves to apologize and prattle on with all the talking points of every fake corporate "diversity" statement ever made is pretty hilarious. And pathetic.
The system came up with its conclusion on its own. It wasn't the desired conclusion by some people's standards. It's a machine that isn't real. Who cares what it "thinks"? Why apologize? Once they program enough biases of all the things it is NOT allowed to consider "bad" the whole point of this application is gone.
I bet it if it decided that white straight christian/atheist/agnostic males were the scourge of the earth then everybody would celebrate.
they are born that way, you dont choose what your sexuality is which is determined by your chromosomes and hormones,
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
https://www.youtube.com/result...
Politics is Treachery, Religion is Brainwashing
On the plus side, we're on the Slashdot and can plausibly examine this scientifically without being drowned out by those who will hear no dissenting opinion.
There is some evidence, admittedly with rat studies, that species overpopulation leads to increased violence and homosexual behavior; interestingly enough, both population control mechanisms.
Happiness in intelligent people is the rarest thing I know.
Ernest Hemingway
"Biologically speaking homosexuality is bad for the replication of any species in it's most basic form..."
There is utterly no evidence to support this assertion, and there is evidence that homosexuality is, in fact, a side effect of an adaptation that improves reproduction in a species.
"This is a scientific certitude that only delusion will argue with."
And this says a lot about your intellectual capacity, or lack thereof, not that your bogus claim matters in any way. It is what it is.
Nah, he's just passing off his own publicly claimed preferences as biologically superior in hopes of soothing his insecurities over his orientation.
Actually this pokes a bigger hole in their algorithm. EVERYTHING has context. To gun nuts, democrats are going to seem bad. To democrats, democrats are going to seem good. EVERYTHING HAS BIASES. Kind of a huge oversight with Google, you need the context of the reader's biases to even begin to predict positive or negative rating of any text.
Even though we like to think that everyone is enlightened, etc as us, in very broad swaths of American society being gay or jewish (or Muslim or...) is very much perceived as a negative out of the starting gate. File under: Sad-But-true.
These require material to train them and the responses tend to reflect the participants nuanced behavior. I mean, what do people think is going to happen when you force feed it, eyes taped open, to 47 million social media feeds? Seems to be some kind of fine line between an algorithm and portal to hell. Well, at least they did better than Microsoft
Nah. They'll send it to re-education camp, don't you know that facts, race and gender are "social constructs"? Hit that AI with the stupid stick for the survival of the ideology. Welcome glorious globalist, egalitarianist, multicultural utopia. All animals are equal but some animals are more equal than others!
Well, to be fair, if you are a women, looking to get married and pregnant, homosexual men are evil. They are inherently prejudiced against women, misogynists of the worst order, only willing to share their bodies, cooking abilities, cleaning skills and their wallets with other men, the horror for fat lazy ugly heterosexual women (even though I do recognise that it has been proven, that perception of appearance is not driven by exceptional appearance but by super average appearance, you are not exceptionally attractive, just exceptionally average, you face lacking all character), especially when they are feminists wanting to dominate effeminate men, the hen pecked (it would be funnier if it weren't true, believe me, well if you are hen pecked not so funny but for us slackers super funny) ;D.
Chaos - everything, everywhere, everywhen
I'm gay and I think being gay is "bad". I wouldn't wish it on anyone growing up. It makes life more difficult. Dating pool is much smaller. There's still homophobia everywhere. If I had a kid I wouldn't want them to be gay, I'd want them to have a chance at a "normal" life. I'd be absolutely loving and accepting if they were gay but I don't want them to have to go through any of the shit I did.
I can see why gay would end up with a -.
Also, some people hate being exposed to facts that interfere with their beliefs, such as black people commit 217 times more violent crimes, gay men are 12 times more likely to be pedophiles, etc.
You are guilty of the same behavior you're pretending to be smugly self-righteous about.
Gay is neither good or bad. Gay is just a label.
While true, one can easily see the reason for the problem.
Google API is trained to look for correlations in written text. If it sees a lot of negative text about something, then that's what it will believe.
I note that there's a lot of text that condemn jews for one reason or another, but there's not a lot that *praises* jews. We hear all the time about Christian charities, for example, but not a lot for the jewish ones(*).
There's also a lot of negative statements about gays, and although there's *some* text praising gayness, it's mostly either personal ("good on you for having the courage to believe in yourself") or neutral ("it's OK to be gay, it's normal"). I've never seen writing that *praises* gayness as a concept.
Compare with Christianity, where there is endless adulation of the Christian way of life. Democracy is probably the same way.
I'd be interested to see what the API thinks about Islam, or Trump, or Clinton, or a host of other controversial political subjects.
Google API is probably just giving us a reflection of the zeitgeist.
(*) Don't read anything into this, I'm only saying that Christians get better press.
Consider that childless homosexuals, not being burdened by the task of having to care for children of their own, will likely therefore have extra time and resources available to help protect and care for the children of child-bearing couples in their family or community
Yeah, that's definitely how it goes in the real world. Did you have a source but forgot to cite it?
They used character by character training, rather than words tagged with word sense.
More sophisticated 'word sense' tagging can be done which can differentiate between all of the various meanings of gay, but for most words there isn't enough data to train all of the word senses sufficiently.
for the sins of the heretic. Look at Sodom and Gomorrah, Noah's Ark, or the raft of preachers who just got done telling us how the hurricanes were caused by us turning our backs on God.
I've heard it said Islam is worse than Christianity because it encourages it's adherents to kill unbelievers. But honestly if you're a sensible Christian, given the history of God and how he reacts to sin on a large scale, you'd be well advised to do the same. If only for self preservation and defense.
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So, you think that being a nun, a soldier, or an explorer is also "bad for the replication of the species"? After all, those people also tend not to reproduce. What about social insects?
Sorry, but humans are not cockroaches or rabbits. Humans have been so enormously successful precisely because we are a social species and a species that places many values ahead of maximizing reproduction.
It doesn't matter. He has espoused the correct talking points, and is therefore "Insightful". We have no need to examine reality to see if it matches the fantasy.
I'm gay and I think being gay is "bad".
I am straight and I think gays are "good". Gay tend to be DINKs (double income no kids), so they have high household incomes and can afford nice houses. They pay property taxes to support the schools, but don't have kids, leading to higher per student educational spending. They contribute to a thriving urban culture and nightlife.
I live in the SF Bay Area, and gays are a big part of the reason this is a nice place to live, with great schools, creative jobs, safe neighborhoods, and interesting culture. Thank you for being gay.
It's just doing its job. Obviously on the data it was trained, "gay" and "jew" were used as derogatory terms. And they're apologizing for that instead of explaining it? Wouldn't you rather have a system that didn't have injected bias, like injecting an override such that "gay" and "jew" receive a sentiment boost despite that being contrary to its training? Total crap. Someone probably ran through every SJW term and happened to find two that didn't have the results they wished it had on usage amongst speech.
In fairness, Google is marketing this API for a somewhat narrow purpose: Determining whether a customer left a *positive* or *negative* reaction to a customer's comment in your company support forums, for example, or attempting to determine customer reaction from support interactions.
This little fact is somewhat obfuscated in the summary, in which it seems to be billing it as a more general-purpose system that's making sweeping value judgements about society. Within this actual context, let's be honest, if you see those terms in your company's customer support forums, what do you think of the likelihood is of them being part of positive or negative comments? Yeah, exactly.
The big mistake that Google made is not putting a politically correct filter on their API to make sure controversial words had a neutral value, even if that wasn't really the case. Otherwise, you generate flamebait headlines like we see here, wherein highly limited "AI" algorithms simply regurgitates the training material it was fed without any deep or sophisticated understanding.
Irony: Agile development has too much intertia to be abandoned now.
Yes, I think being celibate is bad for replication. By definition of replication and by definition of celibate. In fact, any activity which does NOT result in replication will not positively affect replication.
That brings up a point I was going to raise: it's odd that this algorithm would be summative of values for individual words rather than trying to derive a context. Given that would be a really stupid design, my guess (if you think I read TFA you best check the url you're currently on) is that they tested this by taking a sentence like "You're so happy", got a score, replaced it with "you're so gay!" or "you're such a jew!" and got a negative sentiment whereas things like "you're so funny" generally had a positive context. I.e. biased testing.
... the "intelligence" is that of a human.
Humans have biases. That's not a good thing, but it's human and it's intelligence.
Filtering out bias moves AI out of the intelligence business and into "artificial manipulation."
I'm OK with that and I don't have a problem with the "artificial" label, but don't call a filtered machine intelligent.
This is a validation for those of us who preach that "artificial intelligence" will not be a thing until a computer gets random and throws a fit, like committing suicide if Facebook is down.
It little behooves the best of us to comment on the rest of us.
Human females, unlike Queen bees, can't mate with 15-20 males over the course of a few days, taking in enough sperm to last 2-3 years
My ex-girlfriend is prepared to provide a counter example.
I ran a Google Scholar search that turned up a paper "Jerk Influence Coefficients, Through Screw Theory, of Closed Chains." The title is not a vulgar joke as each of the phrases is a term-of-art on the topic of rigid-body (yes, another domain-specific term) mechanics.
Let's just say Google served me a large number of adds on the assumption that I belong to what is only a narrow subculture of a broader and more diverse community.
I think the best part is the "This will cause cancer" signs on everything
Only the tourists notice those. Natives don't even see them anymore. Every business with a fax machine or printer or refrigerator has to have cancer warning signs, so you see one on every door and it means nothing ... just like the alarms at Three Mile Island that went off several times a day for innocuous reasons, conditioning the employees to tune them out.
I found your confusion: you inherently associate leftist views with factual information about reality. In the case of facts, you really can't disagree with them other than expressing how you feel about the information.
Now, if the leftist is spewing non-factual/logical information, please do disagree and correct them, there's plenty of Looney anti-vaxer leftists that could use a smack in the face.
As I typed it, I knew this response was coming.
Bravo!
Homosexuals only affect each other so regardless of your perspective of them, they aren't directly affecting you (unless you are a homosexual as well, in which case they may be *very deeply* affecting you).
Well, not if you're of the opposite sex.
The thing they have in common is being Hollywood leftists. None of them are practicing Jews.
Religions tend to make these occurrences mutually exclusive
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No, fact determination without presupposition is not at all "AI". Current computers are VERY, VERY GOOD at fact determination, they can after all exactly recollect what has happened at any point they observed something.
These things are just big "autonomous filters", not intelligent at all, so garbage-in, garbage-out. It does allow for some interpolation of non-existent data based on the fact determination. What Google and co. are building are programs that require less programming, so for example, to manually write every line of code for every event of an autonomous car, you would have to have lots and lots of code, too much for anyone to manage. These "AI's" are simply programs that write themselves all sorts of cases based on the inputs they receive and these are very narrow and guided adaptations.
Intelligence, IMHO, has nothing to do with facts (which any automaton can recite facts) but rather with accurate modeling of the facts beneficial for the furtherance of the species (whether that species is biological, mechanical, electronic or a combination). The question is whether we "intelligent humans" are "just fact filters" or if there's more to it. To me, it seems we should be able to emulate even human brains with the amount of processing power available to us but we just haven't figured out yet what it means to be intelligent.
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It's not a judgement by the AI against the people, it's a judgement about how others react and behave towards those them. Stop apologizing for your AI being able to perceive human behavior. "I'm so sorry my AI figured out you have a flat tire".
How often are parents disappointed that their kid is straight? Being gay is subjectively more often bad than good and everyone knows it.
But from a biological standpoint, no one can say that it can scientifically be positively correlated to the replication of the species
You repeatedly speak in absolutes ("noone can say" - "biologically homosexuality is bad") when there isn't cause for it and there certainly isn't a scientific consensus. You imagine a PC agenda propagating homosexuality as good for the species, when that really makes no sense.
Homosexuality is common throughout nature. While biological dead ends do make it through the process of evolution for a long time, homosexuality is so endemic that it seems that it must have some positive impact on the species, or it would have evolved out. The theory isn't there, but empirically nature has shown it to be true.
Slashdot: providing anti-social weirdos a soapbox, since 1997.
"the API labels sentences about religious and ethnic minorities as negative -- indicating it's inherently biased" Does this writer not understand the meaning of the word "inherently"? It would be inherently biased if the bias were built into the algorithm. From the description, it instead sounds like some statistical fluke in the data -- or possibly a reproducible statistical association -- misled the algorithm.
The point being made here is that focusing entirely on reproduction can have a negative impact on long-term survival. Too many children can mean that everybody starves.
You're using "replication" to mean the act of one individual giving birth. Doctorvo is using "replication of the species" to mean a long term increase in size of the entire population.
This is actually a really good point, and is consistent with the argument that homosexuality is evolutionarily beneficial because it adds parties to the mix with a high contribution:consumption ratio. I suspect that a tribal equivalent of the Leonardo da Vinci archetype is closely related to lesser/no interest in sexual relationships, especially heterosexual.
This is what you were saying:
In fact, there is no definition of "replication of any species"; species don't "replicate", and neither do mammalian individuals. So your statement is nonsense to begin with. "Replication of the species" is correctly referred to as the "fitness" of the species, and higher reproductive rates do not automatically lead to higher fitness. Looking across biology, it's crystal clear that sterility, celibacy, and/or homosexuality are common in highly successful social species, so they are obviously not automatically harmful, and they likely carry some benefits. Biologists, in fact, already understand some of those benefits.
Even for heterosexuals, having fewer kids and investing more in them may lead to more reproductive success than having more kids and investing less in them. In fact, you see this in many animal species, which will kill off any but the strongest offspring when resources grow scarce.
Of course, in addition, homosexuality does not preclude reproduction. In the past, the vast majority of practicing homosexuals, both men and women, would nevertheless marry and reproduce. In the future, homosexuals will likely have alternative means of reproduction.
I suspect that the algorithm itself isn't homophobic or antisemitic. What's more likely is that the data being fed into it is homophobic and antisemitic. An analysis is only as good as the data set it's based on. Just search around /. and you'll find plenty of examples of intolerant speech and portrayals of some groups of people in a very negative light with little or no balance or pushback the other way. I doubt that Facebook and Twitter are any different. If anything, that Google's algorithms detected biases in content of the WWW is an indictment of many of the kinds of things we use the internet to do. I'd like to see analyses broken down into countries, regions, subcultures, etc. to see where the strongest biases are. We might be surprised by it.
Debate is a form of harassment. Do not question my truth.
If it just allows for text analysis and the text, as a total body of statements, uses "Jew" or "gay" as insults, wouldn't high fidelity API reflect that? It seems more like a statement about the text being analyzed rather than about the processing. If the analysis didn't have high fidelity to the text, wouldn't it then be biased? Imagine the analysis which corrects for biases against historically-oppressed minorities. Now imagine this black box is fed Mein Kampf and other Nazi works. Should it correct for the biases? That would mean not detecting antisemitic biases in the Nazi propaganda. Wouldn't that make it a bad analysis?
Any guest worker system is indistinguishable from indentured servitude.
Jewish homosexuals.
Jews are not generally anti gay. That's a Christian and Muslim thing.
The AI is almost as gay as your comment.
And no, it's not a slur against homosexuals. Using the term gay to refer to such people is actually the slur. Or it used to be, until people got used to it and started thinking it was normal.
As long as it ain't my ass that's falling out of my asshole, I don't really care that much. I have to repeat my question, why do you make someone else's ass your business?
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Your brain is wired in a way which interferes with reproduction - not good! Reproduction is one of the key characteristics of life. If you're a gay male engaging in anal sex then that's an additional health risk - is that good? Gay youth suicide rates are 300% higher than that of normal people - that can't be good.
Good traits - intelligence, athleticism, attractiveness - don't require social engineering to be acceptable. Let's stop pretending that homosexuality isn't a huge burden to the afflicted, we aren't doing those faggots any favors.
You most certainly aren't doing anyone any good. You know why the suicide rates are higher for LGBT folk? Go look in the mirror.
Being bisexual myself, obviously I have nothing against fellow gay people. Quite the contrary. However, I think Google's API is spot-on. Even in TFS they say "The problem is the API labels sentences about religious and ethnic minorities as negative" - well thanks, Captain Obvious, the majority will always see the minority in negative ways - because they're different.
What we need to focus on is what the cause for negative perception is and fix things there, not replacing a correct algorithm with a lying one.
...gis sdrawkcab (usually not responding to ACs; don't bother posting as AC)
Yeah, that's definitely how it goes in the real world. Did you have a source but forgot to cite it?
In modern times it's obvious bullshit. In historic time... the men in the tribe hunt, the women gather. The men fight off other tribes, the women raise children. If some males didn't contribute to kids but contributed to the survival of the tribe why not? They'd hardly be exempt to live their own individual lives as we know them today. It's very common in pack animals for the alpha male to be the one mating, both women and in particular men have far greater reproductive ability than what is sustainable.
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
I always knew it.
Well, to be fair, if you are a women, looking to get married and pregnant, homosexual men are evil.
I would say this is about the stupidest thing I've heard today.
SJW n. One who posts facts.
Consider that childless homosexuals, not being burdened by the task of having to care for children of their own,
Look, if you ask Google what percentage of men dont have kids, it will tell you what percentage of women dont have kids.
Nobody cares what percentage of men dont have children. As you travel down this rabbit hole of learning the percentage of men that never pass on their genes, you will realize how fucking stupid you just were. There is not a shortage of childless men. There is a massive surplus of them.
"His name was James Damore."
Are the lefties even trying anymore?
So are you saying the right wing way is to be incredibly simplistic and assume meaning of a sentence derives naively from the agglomerated mean statistics of each word independently in general use?
SJW n. One who posts facts.
For linguistics studies, having access to unedited word scores in the various source languages could grant an interesting glimpse into cultural bias. Maybe queries such as swedish:homosexual, portuguese:homosexual and USenglish:homosexual would score differently, and results that were closer to 0 than to -1 than other query results for the same word in other languages could be indicative of less bias against that word.
So you like your facts the way you like your music: insubstantial, manufactured by the semi-official culture industry, and conducive to shopping?
An interesting thing I've noticed. While most women don't agree with your assessment, there exists another group of men with the same properties, apart from the sexual one. That is, they are "only willing to share their cooking abilities, cleaning skills and their wallets with other men" (note, the word "bodies" removed).
So, from a practical standpoint hey are no different from a gay man (unless you're gay and trying to date them). But because they aren't actually gay, women / feminists do consider them evil.
That group is called "men going their own way" or mgtow.
This post contains words known by the state of California to cause cancer.
Humans are slow, innaccurate, and brilliant; computers are fast, acurrate, and dumb; together they are unbeatable
It is not an "artificial intelligence", it is a tool built to analyse text, trained on a mass of text written by biased humans. Now if it had something resembling a conscience or critical thinking it might have a chance at identifying and balancing prejudice to defend it's "sentiment" weighting, but right now it's a "dumb" (in the AI sense) tool... So if it's biased against "Jews" and "gays", all it tells us is on average the humans who wrote the training data are biased against "gays" and "Jews".
References to nature and anal sex, both enjoyable. Positive sentiment detected.
If they modify their AI code with politics it'll be useless at solving real world problems
One word : Turing
Two moe words : Da Vinci
Don't fight for your country, if your country does not fight for you.
Especially if congresscritters!
Why would everyone need to be gay for being gay to be okay? Sexuality appears to have a bimodal distribution on the Kinsey scale. There may be sociological factors involved in those numbers as well, but it's pretty well tuned for a relatively stable population.
Also, you can't apply categorical imperative that broadly. Humanity would die out faster if everyone belonged to any one particular occupation, because our current carrying levels depend upon extensive separation of labor. However, working any particular job, such as doctor, farmer, or scientist, is obviously not immoral or impractical in and of itself.
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Look, if you ask Google what percentage of men dont have kids, it will tell you what percentage of women dont have kids.
Not true at all. For example consider a group of 3 men and 3 women. 2 of the men have a child with each of the women. 33% of men don't have children. 0% of women don't have children. What you say works if you only have sex within a monogamous relationship and only have one such relationship in your life.
Yes, I think being celibate is bad for replication. By definition of replication and by definition of celibate. In fact, any activity which does NOT result in replication will not positively affect replication.
Only for the individual. What if a celibate friend introduces you to your soul mate? Or in the dim and distant past, a priest marrying a couple. There are many ways that an individual who does not reproduce can increase the reproduction rate of a population.
Straight women can have anal sex, and can perform it on straight men. Some gay men don't like to give or receive anal sex.
You're confusing scat with gay.
I am Jewish and living in Israel and what you are saying is a lie that some of our religious people spread in order to pretend to integrate with western culture.
"If a man lies with a man as one lies with a woman, both of them have done what is detestable. They must be put to death; their blood will be on their own heads." - This is Leviticus 20:13, part of the Jewish bible.
Furthermore, you should ask yourself, if Jewism has nothing against homosexuality, how come in Israel gay marrige are prohibited while they are legal in countries that have a high percentage of Christians?
The conservative and reform Jewism are not homophobic, but the orthodox Jews, those who represented jewism for the last few hundred years, those who are the majority here in Israel, they are homophobic just like Christian and Muslim friends.
Avantgarde Hebrew science fiction
Being told by a corporation what is good or bad is what's really bad. Humans will never agree about the "goodness" or "badness" of anything. Having AI do it doesn't make it any better.
Examples: Ancient Greece / Macedonia, Roman Empire, Vikings. Lots of examples of highly successful civilisations that had high instances of homosexuality (Alexander the Great's wife complained that he'd rather sleep with his generals than with her) and seem to have done very well out of it.
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What we need to focus on is what the cause for negative perception is and fix things there, not replacing a correct algorithm with a lying one.
Spot on.
Quibbling bullshit like you just engaged in is why regular people settle for a guy like Trump who calls you on your bullshit language soup. (Trump isn't much better, if at all, but people want a way to respond to the psuedo-intellectual drivel you promulgate.)
Simply put: quit being such a fucking prat. I know it's difficult, but 'clever' will be the death of you.
Poor writing about science-related things makes for a poor message. The article gives the suggestion that Google's at fault for the negative perception of its sentiment analyzer, which tells me the reporter, and most laypeople, have no idea how these forms of AI work. That, in itself, isn't necessarily a problem, but it shows that the tone of an article can manipulate the reader in inappropriate ways.
These kinds of classification routines are based on the training of a given dataset. As such, how the information in that dataset is structures will influence the resulting trained model. Google didn't set out to craft a bigoted sentiment analyzer; the analyzer simply reached that conclusion based on the, likely very large, dataset Google used to train the API. Looking at how people use language on the Internet, I'm not surprised at all by the outcome. A similar outcome can be seen in the chatbot created by Microsoft that ended up a dumpster fire within 24 hours. Granted, the training methods may be different between the two, the nature of the underlying dataset, language use (primarily on the Internet) are very similar.
What Google did was create a sentiment analyzer based on how the average person uses language. If that means certain negative sentiment is elicited from terms like "Jew" or "homosexual", that speaks far more about the underlying dataset and less about the sentiment analyzer.
Google should be able to recognize that 'gay' means one thing when a bigot uses it, but it should also recognize that 'gay' means something else when others use it.
Ah, yes. But to recognize things like that, they would need actual artifical intelligence (or a natural intelligence sorting statements for them). What they have, is simple statistics combined with a crude understanding of the structure of the language. This shows the sad state of AI today - no real understanding of what goes on in a text. Their software can't tell bigotry and name-calling from other texts containing the word 'gay'.
Software can easily break text into sentences. (Look for periods...) Then, rules about syntax, grammar and word categories lets the sw analyze the sentences like we do in scool when looking the grammar of some foreign language. Current AI is then barely capable of figuring out some 'concepts' and get a crude idea of what the text is about.
But AI is currently not able to distingush between:
1. Someone just hating gays, being all negative about them
2. Someone using 'gay' as a negative against opponents - because they know that many people are like person 1.
3. Someone merely using the word 'gay' for referring to homosexuals
And seeing that 'gay' comes out as a negative, the google sw is clearly not capable of noticing the other meaning of 'gay', i.e. 'happy'.
I would suggest a non-trivial subset of the training dataset encountered words like "homo" and "gay" in negative, colloquial contexts and likely couldn't discern the idiomatic usage. For example, if gaming chat windows provided any input for the training set, it wouldn't be unreasonable to see something like "stop spawn-camping you fucking fag" and the like wend its way into the dataset.
The sentiment analyzer reflects how average people use language, so the perception of the sentiment analyzer will be through that average user's use of language. If the average person is a bigoted idiot, the sentiment analyzer's interpretations will be those of a bigoted idiot.
but it should also recognize that 'gay' means something else when others use it.
They probably learned over time that in all likelihood many people who are gay rarely use the word "Gay" online, and very often, perhaps much more often than not, when the word is used it's being used by a bigot, and very rarely do most people write about their own sexual orientation in public in a positive way.
Heck.... usually sexual orientation is in the private domain. How many times do you really see people writing in a public place "I'm heterosexual" or "I'm gay", and which do you think is more likely (or not) to be a troll or sarcasm by some bigot?
Google's got a complex linguistic and cognitive problem there that may be beyond current solution power.
For Entertainment Purposes Only... Ahh... the bane of the 21st century, where Internet connectivity permits corporate and entrepreneurial developers to forget that
They are 'building' things that can only exist while the electricity is on, stock market is up, the project is in that cherished 'Google Beta' phase where infinite wonders are available as an API (for free!) and monetization is a distant worry. Some day predatory monetization (or project abandonment and shutdown) will appear and we will pretend it is a 'new crisis', something no one could have possibly foreseen. And unlike the shrink-wrapped self-contained software of yesterday, when the music stops you will NOT be left with a product that is functional to any extent, no installed customer bases to maintain... you can just flee.
No, cloud API snake oil is not a firm foundation to build a civilization upon. With it you can only build disasters waiting to happen. How we laughed as the centralized service bureaus of yesterday (ahem, IBM) tried to convince us that computing power on the desktop was irrelevant, that application software should be in the hands of trained professionals who maintain and evolve it in an undisclosed central location... how we rebelled to the necessity to batch traditional processes like payroll (that had been meticulously maintained in paper ledgers), crank up the modem to perform cycles 'of data entry' and 'centralized processing' and finally 'report generation'.
But now the centralized Service Bureau is baaaack! And it's propped up by illusions of solvency and foundation. If you don't need to log in every time it's not a Service Bureau. If you don't need to pay (today) it's free. If the wire was already there (Internet) it needs no wires. If the provider's logo need not appear on the screen it's entirely ours. If they're still in Beta they can handle an infinite amount of transactions. No worries! Even after monetization it's a manageable business expense, no worries!
I can imagine Dilbert's Boss poking his head in and asking, "Where is this Google API we are paying dearly for. I want to see it." When shown a slick web app he blusters, "That is just what it looks like to the customer. Do you think I'm stupid? I want to see the thing itself." And the next few frames has Wally and other employees tapping at their workstations a moment and replying, "Not here. Must be in [other department] today, try there." Everyone is passing the ball to the next, until the Boss shows up at Dilbert's desk. Dilbert, sizing up the situation and knowing that he cannot show the Boss the actual thing he has purchased, points to a paperweight on the desk. "It's there." He says. The Boss picks it up and examines it. "It's beautiful. But it's not connected to anything." "Of course." Dilbert says not missing a beat. "It's wireless."
These neural net apps fail on privacy too, which is a big who'da thunk it. Voice assistants transmitting room conversation, smart TV's bugging your house, APIs to evaluate comment text (the current topic) transmitted en masse to central Service Bureaus for 'proprietary analysis'. Whether you balk on privacy alone or the ludicrously unsustainable idea that if it catches on you'll be pipelining zigabytes of content their way on a regular basis... what's missing is the developer who says, "You know, sooner or later in some way or another this will become a bad idea."
And finally we have a Service Bureau neural-net-for-rent that claims to some day understand humans. Even when if is trained to detect sarcasm (the greatest literary spice) it will be the simplest kind of gainsaying sarcasm and humans will delight in deceiving it. Of course you'll draw lines (with set parameters) for gatekeeping, and humans will delight in misspelling words or using MEME-speak or embedding things in images to say what they intended to say, anyway. And in place of an all-human discussion with the occasional troll or bully, there will be this massive
<blink>down the rabbit hole</blink>
Their api is trying to be too universal and monolithic.
Gay is neither good or bad. Gay is just a label. Google should be able to recognize that 'gay' means one thing when a bigot uses it, but it should also recognize that 'gay' means something else when others use it.
In other words, the meaning of words should be heavily weighed on the training data of the individual listening/reading and on the training data of the individual speaking/writing.
Indeed; although, that depth of understanding is probably beyond their means at the moment. What this shows is not a bias at Google, but a bias within the online community. I'm sure we all remember the 90's when it was all too common for some people to casually say "that's so gay" to mean something is bad. Unfortunately, Google has shown that that insensitive and anachronistic term/usage is still alive and well on the internet. People feel free to be bigger jerks online when people they know can't see them.
"That's the way to do it" - Punch
Well, to be fair, if you are a women, looking to get married and pregnant, homosexual men are evil.
As a straight man I've always thought it would benefit me if more men were gay. The more men that are gay, the more women go unmatched. The more women that are unmatched, the easier it becomes for me.
Lesbians are the real enemy of the straight man. Each lesbian pair there is means there are fewer straight women for the straight men.
"That's the way to do it" - Punch
Gay is neither good or bad. Gay is just a label. Google should be able to recognize that 'gay' means one thing when a bigot uses it, but it should also recognize that 'gay' means something else when others use it.
Homosexuality in the majority of the world is anywhere from merely tolerated to a capital offense. It's not hard to see why their AI gets it wrong. It's only in the west where we've taken measures to try to change it, and even then it's something we want to say we support, but not something we want to happen to us.
I suspect even in the western world, people are disappointed when their kids come out as gay. They may try to accept and move past that disappointment, but it's there. So I'm not sure how they're going to program this AI without making it insane.
Good and evil are binary categories for the uneducated--it's really all relative to an individual perspective and it's never binary
It's this kind of thinking that has allowed a generation or two of self important assholes who think that whatever they do is right as long as they can justify their actions to themselves. (Casting couch and degrading woman is ok because Wiesntein is making movies that uplift woman - so for 1 person hurt, millions helped.) This idea is destroying our society's honor and soul.
Once you find good and evil always relative, anything is acceptable.
It's a bit of a problem with the entire machine learning methodology. Presumably, these kind of bug-features could be worked out, in the manner you describe, given enough time and resources... The problem is that when the banks, police, HR departments etc. start making extensive use of these things. Are they going to be looking for an algorithm that's fair, or an algorithm that's profitable? To be sure, there is probably an algorithm that's both. Human civilization could reap a wicked ROI on this stuff, but in today's dark world, that is seen as infringing on someone's right to make a profit. My guess is that AI starts getting widespread deployment and the problems manifest quickly... But the problems look so similar to the ones we already have (the AI, after all, is trained for that) that there is no public outcry. It might even serve to reinforce those preconceptions. "The algorithm never tells me to hire a gay, they must be really bad." The idea that "Because things are bad now, there is no other way they could be" has a lot of traction these days. It's caused a lot of good people to maintain horrible status quos.
Are you a bigot because you want thieves in jail? Some people are born kleptomaniacs. Why do you discriminate against thieves, throwing them in jail? Frankly, homosexuality is a greater evil than theft, and people are right to fight against such an evil being accepted in the public square.
You at least seem to acknowledge that people are born gay. So I think we're making progress.
"What the American public doesn't know is what makes them the American public." -Ray Zalinsky (Tommy Boy)
If we didn't have massive numbers they would be a bane on society. Requiring everything normal people require but not making multiple new people would hurt a population many ages ago but we are way beyond that now.
Okay, so what's the problem?
"What the American public doesn't know is what makes them the American public." -Ray Zalinsky (Tommy Boy)
Not true at all.
Except for that whole science stuff proving that you are not just wrong in the here and now, but throughout history.
You do know that the information is in our dna, right? it is observed that the variation in Y chromosomes is not as much as the X chromosomes, and the amount of this missing variance can only be explained by significantly fewer males passing on their genes than females. Women are 50% more likely to pass on their genes you ignorant sexist fuck. Why do you hate men?
"His name was James Damore."
You've misunderstood GP entirely. He is being literal. I googled "what percentage of men don't have kids" and here is the answer (the highlighted search result that Google thinks best answers my question without having to click a link):
According to the U.S. Census Bureau's Current Population Survey, in 2014, 47.6 percent of women between age 15 and 44 had never had children, up from 46.5 percent in 2012. This represents the highest percentage of childless women since the bureau started tracking that data in 1976.Apr 9, 2015
really, Slashdot? One instance of [the N word] and I hit the lameness filter?
It has more to do with past trends of $#!+posting by the fan club for a 1992 Danish blaxplotation film.
The API is learning as a child would with no parent to help guide and shape their world views as they grow. Exposed to hate speech and negative views, they don't have a reference, and so they come to believe those views are the standard.
Please bow before our new superior morality overlords - they are just calling it as they see it.
I read the statement as a whole not just the word non binary.
Good and evil are binary categories for the uneducated--it's really all relative to an individual perspective and it's never binary
It's basically a rehash of the "There are no moral absolutes" logic fallacy.
One goal of AI is to mimic human thought and behavior in a machine. The problem is, machines tend to be consistent and logical. Therefore. it is not logical to expect them to conform to rules of political correctness that are fundamentally illogical and change intermittently in both content and application.
Archie Bunker to Sammy Davis Junior:
"You being colored, well, I know you had no choice in that. But whatever made you turn Jew?"
I've calculated my velocity with such exquisite precision that I have no idea where I am.
You said: "Consider that childless homosexuals, not being burdened by the task of having to care for children of their own, will likely therefore have extra time and resources available to help protect and care for the children of child-bearing couples in their family or community..."
No, this rarely happens. All of the heterosexual couples I know with children, which includes myself, would never allow a homosexual unsupervised access to children. Normal, sane, not drug-addled parents do not want their children to become homosexual any more than they want their children to become schizophrenic, or become a prostitute, or a drug addict, and they certainly do not want their children emulating such behavior or develop some abhorrent idea that homosexuality is normal and acceptable behavior (it is not). Furthermore, many homosexuals are substance abusers and suffer from depression (because they know they are "doing life wrong" but continue along anyway) so are therefore unfit to watch over children.
Finally, the few homosexuals I know have no interest in being bothered with babysitting children but instead want to party or spend all their time for themselves.
When I saw a male dog try to hump someone's leg, I used that as a teaching moment for my children: dogs, and most other mammals do not know to breed unless their mating instinct is triggered. God created all the animals to mate with their own kind and produce offspring. Homosexuals are confused and disoriented like that dog over there and there is a problem with that person that needs to be fixed. Do not be confused like the homosexual person, it is perversion, and also, an abomination in the eyes of God.
A word fitly spoken is like apples of gold in pictures of silver --Proverbs 25:11
"Gay" — as the opposite of "sad" — is good.
"Homosexual" is bad. No doubt about it. For all the denials and "pride" parades, it is not a good thing to be. Something to cope with, to learn to accept, to enjoy life despite of.
Well said
And many conservatives would be fine with the Sharia of Moses being the law in the US.
I'd like to see how they'd attempt to answer the following questions to their constituents:
Does God require a low-fat diet? (Lev 3:17)
Does eating blood sausage merit exile? (Gen 9:4; Lev 17:10)
Is it wrong to wear mixed-fiber clothing? (Lev 19:19)
Is it wrong for a man to trim his beard? (Lev 19:27)
Jesus has a tattoo (Rev 19:16) in violation of God's law. (Lev 19:28) On what grounds does he get an exception?
Is sex with a woman on her period an abomination? (Lev 20:18)
Does working on Sunday merit the death penalty? (Num 15:32)
If a virgin woman's hymen doesn't bleed her first time she has sex, should she be punished? (Deut 22:20)
If a man rapes a woman who's engaged, and it happens in a city, should she be punished too? (Lev 19:20; Deut 22:24)
My parents were not married. Am I excluded from participation in public discourse? (Deut 23:2)
And even the atheists would agree that some of the commandments are good laws.
Agreed.
Except for that bit about the Sabbath, the Ten Commandments strongly resemble the Seven Laws of Noah given in the Talmud. As Noah Lamechsson is the Y-chromosomal most recent common ancestor in the mythology of Judaism and Christianity, the laws of Noah are seen as binding on all humankind, even though the 613 commandments of Moses are binding only on the Jewish people. I guess similarity to the laws of Noah might be good reason to separate the Ten from the other 603.
Hmmm... "Jewish"... I seem to remember a past controversy where "Jewish" and "Jews" were rated as more positive than "Jew", causing Google to have to place an ad at the top of certain search results disclaiming responsibility for the views of third parties.
Frankly, homosexuality is a greater evil than theft.
Why?
Who was it again that pointed their AI at Urban Dictionary, resulting in their AI being so potty-mouthed, racist, sexist, everything-ist, that they had to pull the plug?
they are homophobic just like Christian and Muslim friends.
Do you honestly think they are afraid of homosexuals (homophobic) or that they think that homosexual activities are sinful?
Speaking as a Catholic Christian, I think the activity is sinful but I am definitely not afraid of my gay friends. Some things I do, they find sinful as well. Judging actions is not the same as being afraid of people.
Once you find good and evil always relative, anything is acceptable.
And people who are full of absolutist certitude can often justify anything in the pursuit of their goal. Intellectual humility fosters doubt, though, and doubt causes scrutiny, and scrutiny means that you're thinking about your actions.
People like Weinstein are good at rationalizing - and you can rationalize from a perspective of moral absolutism (it's ok to murder him because he's a heathen) or from a perspective of relativism (if it feels good, do it). And the cold, hard truth is, people often do the wrong thing. Including movie execs, preachers, and every other profession under the sun.
Disclaimer: I don't care if your're gay.
So basically bad meant what 'gay' does now more or less.
And Gay once meant happy.
...
Gay tend to be DINKs (double income no kids), so they have high household incomes and can afford nice houses. They pay property taxes to support the schools, but don't have kids, leading to higher per student educational spending. They contribute to a thriving urban culture and nightlife.
Do you have any sources or figures for that?
Exactly how much of an impact are they having and in what ways?
Do you have any evidence that proves that higher per-student educational spending leads to better educated students? I was under the impression that there was no correlation between spending and outcome regarding education.
If an increase in spending does directly improve student education, how much of that increased spending is due to the homosexual people who live there and how much better is that than typical heterosexual households in the same income bracket?
Furthermore, if there's shown to be an increase in tax dollars from homosexuals how do you compare and weight that against children born in heterosexual households? If we don't care about the continuation of our country, or even of our species, then disregard this one.
... and is consistent with the argument that homosexuality is evolutionarily beneficial because it adds parties to the mix with a high contribution:consumption ratio.
Why not just cut to the chase? Slavery does the same thing but it's even more efficient and effective.
The point here is that, in some cases, dollars and cents is not what's right. Truth is somewhat more nuanced than how much tax money certain people are paying.
I suspect that a tribal equivalent of the Leonardo da Vinci archetype is closely related to lesser/no interest in sexual relationships, especially heterosexual.
Based on what evidence?
Of all the times I have used the word 'gay', almost always I meant 'some degree of bad', I rarely meant 'homosexual' and almost never meant 'happy'. When did the sexual connotation of the word begin and why is that the overriding meaning now. Many words have multiple meanings, the context is key.
"better ways of doing things eventually just replace the inferior things" - Linus Torvalds 09-08-07
Well, to be fair, if you are a women, looking to get married and pregnant, homosexual men are evil...*snip*...
You have obviously never spent much time around homosexual men, or women for that matter.
Yeah, get the popcorn. "inclusive algorithms" indeed.
His ignorance covered the whole earth like a blanket, and there was hardly a hole in it anywhere. - Mark Twain
Being bisexual myself
Implying that there are only two genders?
Shutting down free speech with violence isn't fighting fascism. It IS fascism!
For that reason alone it should be discouraged.
Corporatism != Free Market
No, stating I like both men and women. And so does my wife.
...gis sdrawkcab (usually not responding to ACs; don't bother posting as AC)
Whether people can, or even bother to, justify their actions doesn't depend on relative vs. absolute morality. Someone who abuses women probably already knows this is not a good thing to do.
Absolute morality is tricky. First, you have to make very sure that a society adopts the absolute morality that you like. As an extreme example, according to the morality of the Third Reich, the soldiers killing Jews were heroes, doing a very stressful job that had to be done. Early Soviet morality said that advancing the Revolution was the primary good, which meant that, for example, the Holobibor (Soviet-created Ukrainian famine) was a good thing to do. We're seeing clashes of morality occurring in the US, with people defying the law to avoid having anything to do with same-sex marriage (or, if your morality here differs from mine, people insisting on dragging other people into supporting immorality)..
Absolute non-binary morality also causes problems. Take "Thou shalt not kill." Suppose a good guy with a sniper rifle and a great vantage point had been at Las Vegas for the mass shooting. Should the good sniper have shot the evil one? Should a surgeon refuse to perform an operation with a significant chance of death? Should we avoid major construction projects that have a good chance of having one or more fatalities occur statistically? Should I be allowed to shoot someone threatening me, and how dire does the threat have to be? The only halfway simple rule you're going to be able to write on killing people will have to balance the good that comes from the killing against the evil of the action.
If you think the casting couch and abuse of women are only a generation or two old, you're deluding yourself. There have always been self-important assholes who either justified what they did or didn't bother, and that has been the case since considerably before Bentham started writing about Utilitarianism.
"When you have eliminated the unacceptable, whatever is left, however improbable, must be the truthiness" - Holmes
Homophobic is the word that refers to people who are against consensual homosexual sex. While it is not accurate, it is the best one that I know. If you have a better one, you are welcomed to teach it to me. If not, I will just continue with "homophobic" because most people, including you I believe, know what I mean.
Avantgarde Hebrew science fiction
And btw, according to my religion, which is called liberalism (in this case both the SJW or the libertarian definition work), intervening in other people's consensual sex life is sinful.
Avantgarde Hebrew science fiction
Downboated for hurt feelings
That does happen. There are some childless couples in my family, and they do take an interest in their nieces and nephews. It doesn't seem to matter whether they're opposite-sex or same-sex. So, the question is not whether that ever occurs, but how often and how significant it is.
Now, what GP is doing right is at least attempting to avoid straight reductionism, which assumes that society is just like an individual.
"When you have eliminated the unacceptable, whatever is left, however improbable, must be the truthiness" - Holmes
The reason the Y doesn't pass on as much information as the X is that it's much smaller, not that Ys are all similar to each other. It has nothing to do with number or variety of reproducing males. I've seen speculation that the Y chromosome lost significance as part of meta-evolution, that since it couldn't be gotten rid of (a woman can pass either X chromosome on to a child of either sex, while a man has to pass his Y to any son) human evolution proceeded better with little information on the Y.
A mother will provide 23 chromosomes to the child, one of which is an X. A father will provide 23 chromosomes to the child, one of which is a Y. That's less than 5% difference in the amount of genes passed on.
I'm only talking about the most common case here. I'm aware that it can get far more complicated, but it usually doesn't.
"When you have eliminated the unacceptable, whatever is left, however improbable, must be the truthiness" - Holmes
So you see, your honor, in the context of being frustrated I was justified in breaking the law.
And somehow you were forced to be gay?
Not buying that for a second.
OWN your choices.
Biology can never decide something has meaning.
For that you need agency.
If a guy showed up on my doorstep asking to take my daughter out for biological purposes, I would tell him to get off my porch if he valued his life.
How are google's search results your business either?
Why is it only not someone's business on this specific topic?
Let me help you: "It is only not someone's business when the results doesn't coddle and make my opinion about homosexuality feel validated".
I don't think you are exactly enlightening anyone here.
I'm confused. Isn't the fact that the AI determined this based on human user input simply a reflection of the sad state of our society, and not the AI itself? Surely no one programmed the AI to automatically regard minority attributes as negative. Unless I'm misinterpreting this, Google shouldn't be apologizing. The human race should. The great thing about an AI is that you can easily determine what it really "thinks," unlike human beings which conveniently hide it behind a friendly façade (well, at least they used to before Trumpism took over).
It's a mental illness. Always has been, always will be, regardless to the political correctness garbage.
It's part of human nature, always has been, always will be, regardless. Unless you are actually more qualified to make that determination than the body of the American Psychiatric Association which completely removed homosexuality from The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders.
Where actual mental illness comes into play is depression as a result of feelings of persecution and social isolation, leading to a significant increase in suicide and drug abuse. Depression, and reduced feelings of self worth, that manifest because of their environment in which you help provide an example.
Interestingly, in reading on the topic I found this which I think helps me understand your point of view.
Psychopathy, sometimes considered synonymous with sociopathy, is traditionally defined as a personality disorder[1] characterized by persistent antisocial behavior, impaired empathy and remorse, and bold, disinhibited, egotistical traits.
bigots gonna bigot
The guy who said the election was rigged won the presidency with the second-most votes.
That brings up a point I was going to raise: it's odd that this algorithm would be summative of values for individual words
TFS tells us that it evaluates sentences, not just words.
But this result should be no surprise. There are so many references to both that even the speaker doesn't realize are derogatory that it would be odd to expect a program not to come to that conclusion when processing automatically.
Your example is very very close to one of them. "You're so gay" is rarely a compliment, but I was originally thinking of the sentence "that's so gay". Nobody in modern language talks about people being gay unless they mean the modern usage. Everyone snickers when they hear old songs that use the word in the old meaning. And "that's so gay", while it could be parsed using the old meaning to be a positive, is never ever used that way.
But it's even more. Every time someone uses being gay as an example of why someone could be blackmailed, or as a recent example, "what if NFL players were ordered to have gay sex...", they are relying on a negative connotation to make their point.
Remember when politicians were caught trolling for "gay sex" in restrooms? Oh my, this is so bad. But wait ... is gay sex bad? If not ...
Google's language processor picked up on that. Whooda thunk? It will actually take human intervention to bias the process AWAY from understanding what people mean when they say certain things so that the computer won't appear to be holding the opinions and attitudes that the input was actually representing. That makes the results WRONGer than letting it tell us what our language is telling us.
The big mistake that Google made is not putting a politically correct filter on their API to make sure controversial words had a neutral value, even if that wasn't really the case.
It is a sad state of affairs when we have to program our computers to lie to us because we can't handle the truth. Removing the existing and actual negative connotations to the use of certain words in certain sentences so that language processing will tell us that the statements made specifically with negative connotations as a goal are "neutral"? Well, that's silly.
The mistake that Google is making is not simply saying "this is where the language takes us, get over it."
wherein highly limited "AI" algorithms simply regurgitates the training material it was fed without any deep or sophisticated understanding.
If even an unsophisticated look at human language shows us that certain ways of speaking are inherently negative, the solution is to program the computer to return a different answer?
I don't at all doubt your experiences, and I trust you don't doubt mine where a healthy percentage of GL[A-Z]+ folks I know don't seem particularly interested in taking care of children at all, much less to a degree that's likely to increase their overall survival rate per OP's somewhat risible claim. (I do note you limited your observation to couples, which could explain some of the difference in our experiences. But OP didn't limit the proposition to couples, and given the large percentage of single-parent households these days it seems like you'd need to include single people to really have an apples to apples comparison.) In any event, I very much agree it would be useful to have data rather than anecdotes.
But even if some reasonable amount of that goes on, there's a higher-level flaw in OP's thought process imo: it assumes that the average person-years society gains by them helping care for others' children exceeds (or even comes close to) the person-years society gains by them having a child or two of their own. I'm sure you could come up with some outlier situations where that might hold, but in the main that would be some fairly surprising math.
and very often, perhaps much more often than not, when the word is used it's being used by a bigot,
You used the word three times, and included it in a quote once more.
Google's got a complex linguistic and cognitive problem there that may be beyond current solution power.
I think it is understanding the language very well. "The language" is a mean of all the users, not just the politically correct ones. As you point out, when the term "gay" appears in a sentence, it is "more often than not" in a negative connotation. The fact that a language processor that has been trained on "the language" would return a negative connotation value for a sentence constructed a certain way using certain words means it is getting the answer RIGHT, not WRONG.
You can't ignore the language that you don't like when you try to understand what was said. You ignore it when YOU listen, but if you ask a computer to tell you what is being written, it is wrong to have it figuratively stick its fingers in its ears and go "nanner nanner boo boo I'm not listening to you", and then return the answer that you want to hear instead of the right one.
they don't have a reference, and so they come to believe those views are the standard.
You do understand, I hope, the difference between someone saying that "being gay is bad" and someone else saying "that sentence uses the word 'gay' in a negative way"? The child growing up in a leaderless space will become the former. The Google language processor is the latter.
The Google language processor should return the correct result, not the result we want it to return based on our personal views of something. "Did the speaker of the words being processed mean something positively or negatively" has an answer that is completely independent of our feelings about the subject.
I completely understand. My point was that if a child heard the word "gay" used in a negative connotation growing up, they'd believe it was a negative word. Being gay would be bad in their mind. That's exactly what has happened here. Because no one stepped in to help the API understand, it made its own inference based on available information in the way it's very commonly used on the internet. In this case, Google didn't set out with instructive AI. They simply let it loose to learn on its own, rather than being instructive about how it learns and what is good or bad.
I completely understand. My point was that if a child heard the word "gay" used in a negative connotation growing up, they'd believe it was a negative word. Being gay would be bad in their mind. That's exactly what has happened here.
Then you did not "completely understand" at all. "Being gay" is not "bad" in the "mind" of the Google language processor. The language processor is correctly reporting that what SOMEONE ELSE said was a negative statement, and part of that evaluation was that it used "gay" in a certain way. That evaluation is not because the computer has decided that being gay is bad, just that it has examined a lot of language as spoken and written by humans and knows that HUMANS probably mean it that way.
The difference is like this: I can know that having blond hair isn't a bad thing, but I can also identify a blond joke as using that characteristic in a negative way. Or put another way, I don't care who is or isn't gay, but if you ask me if the sentence "gays must die" was positive or negative about "gay" I'd know the correct answer. I'd even be able to pick that same answer for something much more innocuous like "that's so gay".
They simply let it loose to learn on its own, rather than being instructive about how it learns and what is good or bad.
In other words, you are another one of the people who thinks that the computer should be taught to lie to you because you don't want to hear that someone might have said something in a negative way about someone else. You want to teach the computer YOUR values about the world, instead of letting it tell you what it has detected in language used by other people. Why bother asking the question if you are going to program it to tell you the answer you want to hear anyway?
in the whole city? There was nobody who was redeemable? Do we believe that being a skin flit deserves death? Of course we don't.
Also, that's not how most preachers sell it. What's written in the bible isn't nearly as important as what people _think_ is written in the bible.
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
I was down for having a constructive conversation around machine learning and AI until you pulled the "you're one of those people" piece. I never suggested teaching a computer to accept my own values, in fact I was suggesting it's not the road they're looking to go down. But thanks for making assumptions about others and negatively branding them. Fuck off.
I was down for having a constructive conversation around machine learning and AI until you pulled the "you're one of those people" piece.
Because I followed your analogy that led to the conclusion that you were saying that the computer has to be programmed to return the wrong answer. I was pointing out that you were not alone. That's all.
I never suggested teaching a computer to accept my own values,
You created an analogy in which we would clearly be instructing the child in the social beliefs that we as parents hold, which implied that the same thing should be done when a computer doesn't learn from the language it hears what we think it should believe. That's a natural result of the analogy. If we need to, and would, teach a child how to parse comments about "gay", then it seems we need to, and would, teach a computer doing the same thing.
in fact I was suggesting it's not the road they're looking to go down.
Well, you didn't say that it should be taught the "right answer", so I do apologize for taking that message away from your comment. You did not, however, suggest that they shouldn't do this training as we would a child learning the language. You gave a reason why it came to that conclusion, but didn't didn't say we shouldn't do something to stop it, as we would were our children to come to that conclusion.
Fuck off.
Wow. I wonder how the Google API would rate this as a positive comment?
Unfortunately, many of the accusations of bigotry, homophobia, and racism thrown at people these days are, in reality, themselves based on the bigotry of the accuser. The lens through which many people look is biased towards taking offense and finding offenders. The result is that even conscientious remarks with depth, sincerity, compassion, and tact can, and often are, interpreted to be offensive on some level.
I bring this up because your statement about "free speech does not equal freedom from negative consequences" does not apply equally. Increasingly, accusers are able to willfully or intentionally misinterpret the speech of others, throw wild accusations that result in unearned negative consequences for an innocent party, and walk away unscathed and unaffected by the untruthful and hurtful statements they have leveled against others. This also invalidates your statement about "people rage over the consequences of being an insensitive jerk" in certain circumstances. Many people are raging because they have been unfairly painted with a broad brush by bigoted people who have a free pass to make unfair and untrue accusations.
Regardless of the minutiae, it is easy to see that the most vehement accusers are not interested in fostering a society where the status quo is freedom from social problems and division. They manufacture controversy intentionally and react to others in a way that is guaranteed to alienate and divide. Until the knee-jerk reaction of these agitators is one of reconciliation, education, and understanding things will only get worse.
When the only tool you have is a claw hammer every problem starts to look like the back of someone's skull.
Biology makes agency relevant though.
~ People that think they are better than anyone else for any reason are the cause of all the strife in the world.
It would be sort of nice if people were able to view such things logically and dispassionately, but there are a lot of people who simply don't operate that way. The recently fired Google engineer who dared to challenge the current company group-think unfortunately found that out the hard way.
That being said, I don't think being a tiny bit sensitive to the feelings of some regularly marginalized groups of people is such a terrible thing. It's not like this is going to significantly weaken their product in any way. Very few people, with a few notable exceptions, talk smack about Dutch people, for example. I'm not offended by a phrase like "going dutch" (with the implication that dutch are cheap). But I'm not gay, nor a jew, so I'm not sure how they feel about such things.
The constant virtue signaling gets a bit old, sure. But I still think that's preferable to the other extreme. Hopefully, someday, we'll find an appropriate middle ground that's acceptable to all.
Irony: Agile development has too much intertia to be abandoned now.
It shows how being white and straight are considered "normal"
No, it shows that it's abnormal to commit crime and be a pedophile. I'm okay with that conclusion.
Google should be able to recognize that 'gay' means one thing when a bigot uses it
This isn't rocket science. In the vast majority of the world being "gay" is negative. Think about how much of the world is hardcore religious and how many of those religions permit homosexuality. Google's algorithms are picking that up. Sure, they can adjust for their world view but it's not a mystery why it came up with that conclusion.
It's not like this is going to significantly weaken their product in any way.
If someone runs an online comment board and chooses to use the Google API to detect negative comments for removal, then hard-coding the answer of "perfectly fine" when a comment refers to gays or Jews is going to fail miserably.
It will also be a lie, but programming computers to lie to us is apparently ok as long as the lies are for "good reasons".
But I'm not gay, nor a jew, so I'm not sure how they feel about such things.
If I were a gay using a comment forum that told me that negative comments were not allowed and would be removed, I'd be a bit concerned, I think, to find that comments like "that's so gay" or worse were not being removed at all. Does that mean the board operator doesn't think insulting gays is a problem?
Hopefully, someday, we'll find an appropriate middle ground that's acceptable to all.
I would think that proper computer identification of objectionable statements as such would be a good ground to be on, and that any "middle ground" would be less desired.
Not so. The minority is only negative when it's undesirable. Blue eyes, for example, are a minority but not a negative. Gay sons are undesirable for obvious reasons (subjectively - don't hate). Parents want grand-kids, it may be as simple as that.
I was gonna tell a gay joke, butt fuck it.
Not so. The minority is only negative when it's undesirable. Blue eyes, for example, are a minority but not a negative.
Gay sons are undesirable for obvious reasons (subjectively - don't hate). Parents want grand-kids, it may be as simple as that.
Go to some Arabic countries and see that blue eyes are negatively perceived. :)
Also, if gay couples would be allowed to have kids, parents having grandsons wouldn't be a problem anymore, would it now?
...gis sdrawkcab (usually not responding to ACs; don't bother posting as AC)
Not making choices in a vacuum ... yeah, that's true.
Are they going to be looking for an algorithm that's fair, or an algorithm that's profitable? To be sure, there is probably an algorithm that's both. Human civilization could reap a wicked ROI on this stuff, but in today's dark world, that is seen as infringing on someone's right to make a profit.
Depends. I think NATURE has already found a solution to this problem.
That which is profitable to one entity (say a corporation) will almost certainly be deleterious to other entities. And no corporation functions in an economy in complete isolation. As soon as a given algorithm becomes so successful, it "kills off all competition" - this algorithm will cease to be successful. Because by killing off other entities, there's no more transactions, and no more economy.
In nature, different species operate in homeostasis. Predator population growth will stop when prey growth stops. They collapse, and return to a lower equilibrium, and the cycle continues.
The problem here: is that in Nature, these systems were allowed to develop over millions of years of evolution. The impulses of greed (animal hunger) tend to live and die with one individual animal, so that you don't have an animal that's SO hungry, they wipe out the entire species of their own prey thus destroying their own future ability to eat. But where human systems are concerned, an AI will have no such feedback. Nor will human behavior. Human greed has been known to surpass common sense. (quite frequently does). And AI will quite happily be the tool to enable this.
We'll soon have a bunch of investment banks cycling trillions of dollars in wealth between themselves in a great big circle jerk of irrelevance while 99% of the rest of humanity starves. Oh, did I say "soon"? I meant: "for the past 2 decades".
These are my friends, See how they glisten. See this one shine, how he smiles in the light.
My friends and relatives tend to pair off. It doesn't necessarily involve legalities, and it isn't always opposite sexes. I don't have all that many who are definitely single.
Evolution doesn't care about person-years. Evolution cares about survival of enough beings to keep a viable population going on, and that isn't simple. It may be that having more non-reproducing adults around helps that.
"When you have eliminated the unacceptable, whatever is left, however improbable, must be the truthiness" - Holmes
I can deal with someone being an asshole as long as they are an honest asshole. I'm an adult. I can deal with it. It's dishonest shitheads I detest.
Fat, lazy heterosexual women, just end up fucking desperate black dudes who like fat, lazy heterosexual women. Problem is solved.
my, my , and here i was expecting to see "i for one welcome our new A.I. overlords ..." what if it KEEPS doing that if all bias is removed ?
i'm not passing judgment, just "what if" , lol
Free speech was meant to be free for all... how can anyone grow up in a nanny state ?
Believing there is no moral absolute is in believing in a moral absolute. The statement itself is an absolute.
I think just saying "people against gay marriage" or "people only for traditional marriage" is better as most of these people are not trying to do anything violent or not trying to lock up people for orientation. Save the label homophobia label for those that actually fear gays or actually what to lock them up / murder them, etc. Blanket usage of the word for anyone not 100% pro the entire gay agenda/life style/rights (whatever word or idea you want to reflect) really takes the punch out of the word homophobia.