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Comment by jedberg | Hacker News Reader

If you really want to be disappointed, search for [doctor] and [nurse].

Unless things have really changed, [doctor] will be mostly white men and [nurse] will be mostly white and Filipino women.

But don't blame the AI. The AI has no morality. It simply reflects and amplifies the morality of the data it was given.

And in this case the data is the entirety of human knowledge that Google knows about.

So really you can't blame anyone but society for having such deeply engrained biases.

The question to ask is does the programmer of the AI have a moral obligation to change the answer, and if so, guided by whose morality?

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Those look almost entirely like stock photos or part of advertisements. It's probably just reflecting the biases of what photos other businesses like, which get the label of "doctor" or "nurse".

Any sort of image search is going to tend to be biased toward stock photos, because those images are well labeled, and often created to match things people search for.

> The AI has no morality. It simply reflects and amplifies the morality of the data it was given.

Key point right there. Unless Google is deliberately injecting racial and/or gender bias into their code, which seems extremely far fetched (to put it kindly), the real fault lies with us humans and what we choose to publish on the web.

All the young doctors are women. 13 women to 12 men.

Nurses it's 34 women to 5 men. Proportions of skin tones are what I'd expect to see in a city in my country.

What does the color of people's skin in search results have to do with morality? I was raised not to see color, now we have this "progressive" movement hell bent on manipulating search results to disproportionately represent minorities. If you want to filter your search results based on the color of skin you can do that easily.

What bias? Who is biased? Quick duckduckgoing indicates there are far more male than female doctors in the US. So statistically, it would be correct to return mostly male doctors in an image search. If you want a photo of a specifically gendered doctor, it's not hard to specify. Not really seeing a problem here.

> What bias? Who is biased?

I would contend that society is biased. There is no evidence that says men are better doctors than women, and in fact what little this has been studied says that women make better doctors than men (and is reflected in the more recent med school graduation classes which are majority women).

So it's a question of what you are asking for when you search for [doctor]. Are you asking for a statistical sampling or are you asking for a set of exemplars?

> So statistically, it would be correct to return mostly male doctors in an image search.

And that's exactly it. The AI has no morality. It's doing exactly what it should, and is amplifying our existing biases.

> So really you can't blame anyone but society for having such deeply engrained biases.

You can blame statistics for that. Beyond that, you can blame genetics for slightly skewing the gender ratios of certain fields and human social behavior to amplify this gap to an extreme degree.

Honestly, I don't think morality is the issue here; it is objectively inaccurate to show only white men for the search string "doctor" when not all doctors in the U.S. are white men, and most doctors in the world are not white men. This would be like showing only canoes if someone searched "boat"--we would rightly consider that an error to be corrected.

IMO, wrapping it in a concept like "morality" because the pictures have people in them just serves to excuse the problem and obscure its (otherwise obvious) solution.

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