Hacker News Reader

I know some people on HN and elsewhere think that all AI ethics work is a bit of a joke. I'm not one of those people - I think the work that people like Gebru and Mitchell do is serious and has merit. But even I think this dude's concerns are a joke. This is just the modern version of the people who thought ELIZA was sentient.

View on HN

I am mostly in the same camp as you - I think there is some merit to AI ethics, and especially problems like the one this guy was actually assigned to work on (social biases in the training sets leading to social biases in the output of such algorithms).

What gives me pause in the case of Mitchell is that, according to this author, she actually took his claim seriously and helped him devise an experiment that further convinced him his ridiculous concern merited escalation...

I kept rereading it to see if perhaps I missed something - even went on his twitter and his blog. And his quotes are being repeated verbatim - really showed the danger of having journalists work on stories in areas where they have absolutely no idea what’s going on. Any competent tech journalist would’ve laughed this story off - man spoke to a chatbot. But I guess the Public’s perception of “AI” at the moment is what they see in movies and wildly exaggerated ads about intelligent devices. One of the answers (“It is what makes us different than other animals.”) also tipped me off - regularly, we would use “different from” - so this sounded like generated text. I wish it was true - sentient AI would really shake things up. But the person who discovers it isn’t going to be just put on administrative leave. Strong AI is the holy grail of the industry right now.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com