This is nonsense. It’s just generating the most likely image. Probabilities are not in and of themselves racist/misogynist.
One could say (and some have said) that the tendency of some facial recognition software not to recognize black faces is not racist - but simply a matter of physics. What's racist is the culture of software engineering which only tests that software on white faces, and doesn't consider it a problem.
Likewise the 'most likely image' of a nurse being a non-white female and a CEO or lawyer being a white male is still a problem even if it accurately reflects racial and gender class role biases in society. Eventually these systems will enforce and maintain power structures and media narratives which themselves are already built upon racial and gender prejudice.
That's a pretty cynical take. Every project I've ever worked on, regardless of the problem domain, operated with the 80/20 rule in mind. Solve the easy problems first, get something out the door and then work on the harder problems. If dark skin is a harder problem in image recognition, it doesn't mean a developer is racist for solving the easier parts of the problem first.
Did you become an engineer to work on easy problems?
Racism doesn't always come from overt bigotry or hatred. It can be expressed by simply accepting the status quo of systemic bias, because it's less work, or more cost effective, than doing otherwise.
Agreed, but. Since the 'culture of software engineering' likely reflects society-at-large (maybe a step up) ... how do you construct training models that reflect a more refined and caring reality than the one we've got?
If what they're showing us accurately mirrors what they're seeing, that's a service. If we find it painful, well, we made it that way.
As simple as no bonuses, no stock options, no promotions and most importantly no deployment if the model produces undesirable results.
The models reflect what AI ideology directs Amazon Turks to find. It reflects what is considered accurate and does not reflect classifications that might be perceived to put Amazon Mechanical Turk’s contracts at risk.
“We” didn’t make it that way because I know I am not using Amazon Mechanical Turk to classify images.
I mean even if the exploitive wage structure went away, the name itself is consistent with AI ideology that racism, religious intolerance, and nationalism are ok.