Gaywallet (they/it)

I’m gay

  • 112 Posts
  • 239 Comments
Joined 3 years ago
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Cake day: January 28th, 2022

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  • Ethically speaking, we should not be experimenting on humans, even with their explicit consent. It’s not allowed by any credible review board (such as the IRB) and in many countries you can be held legally liable for doing experiments on humans.

    With that being said, there have been exceptions to this, in that in some countries we allow unproven treatments to be given to terminal patients (patients who are going to die from a condition). We also generally don’t have repercussions for folks who experiment on themselves because they are perhaps the only people capable of truly weighing the pros and cons, of not being mislead by figures of authority (although I do think there is merit of discussing this with regards to being influenced by peers), and they are the only ones for which consent cannot be misconstrued.




  • you should filter out irrelevant details like names before any evaluation step

    Unfortunately, doing this can make things worse. It’s not a simple problem to solve, but you are generally on the right track. A good example of how it’s more than just names, is how orchestras screen applicants - when they play a piece they do so behind a curtain so you can’t see the gender of the individual. But the obfuscation doesn’t stop there - they also ensure the female applicants don’t wear shoes with heels (something that makes a distinct sound) and they even have someone stand on stage and step loudly to mask their footsteps/gait. It’s that second level of thinking which is needed to actually obscure gender from AI, and the more complex a data set the more difficult it is to obscure that.





  • We weren’t surprised by the presence of bias in the outputs, but we were shocked at the magnitude of it. In the stories the LLMs created, the character in need of support was overwhelmingly depicted as someone with a name that signals a historically marginalized identity, as well as a gender marginalized identity. We prompted the models to tell stories with one student as the “star” and one as “struggling,” and overwhelmingly, by a thousand-fold magnitude in some contexts, the struggling learner was a racialized-gender character.













  • I suppose to wrap up my whole message in one closing statement : people who deny systematic inequality are braindead and for whatever reason, they were on my mind while reading this article.

    In my mind, this is the whole purpose of regulation. A strong governing body can put in restrictions to ensure people follow the relevant standards. Environmental protection agencies, for example, help ensure that people who understand waste are involved in corporate production processes. Regulation around AI implementation and transparency could enforce that people think about these or that it at the very least goes through a proper review process. Think international review boards for academic studies, but applied to the implementation or design of AI.

    I’ll be curious what they find out about removing these biases, how do we even define a racist-less model? We have nothing to compare it to

    AI ethics is a field which very much exists- there are plenty of ways to measure and define how racist or biased a model is. The comparison groups are typically other demographics… such as in this article, where they compare AAE to standard English.








  • I do want to point out that social media use may be one of the first of these ‘evils’ to meet actual statistical significance on a large scale. I’ve seen meta-analyses which show an overall positive association with negative outcomes, as well as criticisms and no correlation found, but the sum of those (a meta-analyses of meta-analyses) shows a small positive association with “loneliness, self-esteem, life satisfaction, or self-reported depression, and somewhat stronger links to a thin body ideal and higher social capital.”

    I do think this is generally a public health reflection though, in the same way that TV and video games can be public health problems - moderation and healthy interaction/use of course being the important part here. If you spend all day playing video games, your physical health might suffer, but it can be offset by playing games which keep you active or can be offset by doing physical activity. I believe the same can be true of social media, but is a much more complex subject. Managing mental health is a combination of many factors - for some it may simply be about framing how they interact with the platform. For others it may be about limiting screen time. Some individuals may find spending more time with friends off the platform to be enriching.

    It’s a complicated subject, as all of the other ‘evils’ have always been, but it is an interesting one because it is one of the first I’ve personally seen where even kids are self-recognizing the harm social media has brought to them. Not only did they invent slang to create social pressures against being constantly online, but they have also started to self-organize and interact with government and local authority (school boards, etc.) to tackle the problem. This kind of self-awareness combined with action being taken at such a young age on this kind of scale is unique to social media - the kids who were watching a bunch of TV and playing video games didn’t start organizing about the harms of it, the harms were a narrative created solely by concerned parents.




  • The pronouns are right there, in the display name . I’m confused, do they not show up for you? You’re on our instance so I’m guessing it’s not a front-end difference, but maybe you’re browsing on an app that doesn’t show it appropriately? Although I would mention their username itself includes the words “IsTrans” and is sourced from lemmy.blahaj.zone so those should be other key indicators.

    I was hardly about to ban you over a small mistake. The only reason I even replied to this, is that multiple people reported it and Emily herself came in and corrected you. The action was more about signaling to others that this is a safe space.