Is autocorrect racist? The push to stamp out 'galling' ethnic name bias on phones and computers
Is autocorrect racist? The push to stamp out 'galling' ethnic name bias on phones and computers
A new campaign — called I Am Not A Typo — is urging tech companies to fix ethnic bias in their algorithms to stop autocorrect mangling so many people's names.
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There's a few issues with this article, namely auto-correct doesn't use any AI as such (I believe, it's a pretty old thing). I agree with the general argument that the name dictionaries of these auto-correct should be expanded to recognise more names, but I think labeling it "racist" is moronic. I also take issue with this weird dig:
"The big problem is a lot of artificial intelligence scrapes the internet, whether it's writing or music or blog sites or whatever, and so much of the stuff on the internet has been made by white men.
"Effectively, AI is starting to mimic those white men, and you can see that AI on a number of platforms is increasingly becoming kind of racist and more sexist.
I don't think it's "white men" that are the problem - it's snarky redditors and stack exchange contributors. I'd might as well blame Italians for fascism or Muslims for 9/11.
Like it or not AI needs training data - and if you want a more diverse training set get out there and make it for free like everyone else does. It's a shame how sites like Twitter and Facebook have kind of killed personal blogs and promote shorter-form content which is harder to find, it's amazing how much useful stuff I find comes from random old blogs.
It is racism - an unthinking one, but still so.
Where did those dictionaries come from? Why were they chosen? Not every act of racial bias involves a burning cross or a nazi.
With an english speaking AI it's gonna be based on a library of shitposters and snarkers - and yeah, they're gonna overstep a lot of lines and they're gonna have bias, conscious or otherwise. And the two sources you cite are overwhelmingly white male.
> And the two sources you cite are overwhelmingly white malewhat sources??Edit: nevermind worked it out
Yeah AI companies are being stupid using Reddit, Twitter and StackExchange, but there's no magic fix to get more diverse AI. Would they need to pay people of underrepresented groups to write training material? Is that racist? Why should they get paid when everyone else is doing it for free?
I don't think they were being intentionally racist when they made the dictionaries for auto-correct - the article says it only accounts for around 41% of English names - but most modern auto-correct things on phones at least seem to add words to your dictionary if you use them a lot, and they've probably been limited by file size requirements in the past.
It's an example of structural/systemic/societal racism. Western industrialised civilisation has been developed and led by white men for hundreds of years - the inherent bias that comes from that often ends up discriminating against and disenfranchising non-white, non-male people in society without anyone deliberately intending it. Another way to think about it is that white men experience a higher level of privilege by default than any other group in Western society. As a white man, I have the privilege of my name being included (or being more likely to be included) by default in one of these dictionaries.