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Comment by monkeywork | Hacker News Reader

The models output isnt racist. Racism has intent, the algo doesn't.

It can be wrong or right but it is not making a judgment based on anything outside of math.

You are correct to say the training wasn't complete but that doesn't mean anyone did anything wrong, racist, or hateful... 99% of the time it's simply a mistake.

When you label things like that as racist instead of simply mistakes you water that word down to the point where it becomes meaningless.

The problem in the last 10+ yrs of outrage internet social justice is that in order to gain attention and get traction those involved have lumped so many things into terms like racism that that it eventually becomes so stretched it's meaningless.

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> Racism has intent

This is a failure to understand centuries of history. It’s an understandable one, it’s one I used to relate more to and I probably still relate to it far more than I should.

The notion of racism requiring malice is so far from reality that similar defenses were dismissed almost a century ago in international tribunals which still shape the world.

It takes no malice to participate in racism. It only takes accepting it as given. This doesn’t have anything to do with anything that’s originated from the internet, from any perspective. It doesn’t make racism meaningless. Treating it that way does though.

“The” problem is that racism, as a societal background factor, is treated as the sea in which we swim, it’s “neutral” without an actor present to promote it. If it just “is”, no one is “at fault” and… the kicker, if your definition requires intent and there isn’t any intent for the specifics under question… it’s not just a mistake, it has defenses like these to shield and bolster it.

You can rail against “social justice” all you like, and I’m betting my response will show your railing resonates more here than it should. But your position is ahistorical and probably based in defensiveness about something you don’t need to defend.

I didn't say racism requires malice - I said it required intent, most of the time that intent is malice but not always. The current pop culture version of racism isn't often racism, it's prejudice or stereotyping or most often simply ignorance.

Two people can make the exact same remark and one can be racist and one can be based on innocent ignorance/curiosity. A young white child is spending time with a black person for the first time and says "your hair is weird", is a vastly then if that same person said it while in high school and was bullying the black kid in class. The former isn't racist and the latter is.

I don't rail against social justice, progress is good and I think everyone of every creed / sexuality / gender / etc should be free to express themselves and live their best lives without being judged for who they were born or identify as.

What I do rail against though is the use of manipulating language to bully and harass people because a social credit / status / clout of trying to always be finding demons to expose is the norm. I personally believe that people who do this (often the "social justice warriors" so to speak) are root for most of the radicalization of BOTH sides of the political spectrum in the western world right now.

Idk, I struggle with this. I agree that watering down words is a problem. For example see people saying speech can be violence or even inaction can be violence or some like, but I think humans are tempted to ascribe the past to evil. If you think racism has to be intentional then it's an easy jump to say that racists must be aware of their racism, and before you know it you believe that evil looks like Voldemort and not some guy administering a study about syphilis. I think the truth is people in the past were much more explicitly racist, but also used a lot of the same excuses you'd see today. Things like the economics dictating that film should be optimized for light skin, or worrying about property values or something. By and large people don't think of themselves as racist so they don't do things with racist intent, they just happen to be racist and that influences the the things they do. Plus I'm not convinced that anything has free will making the whole question of intent less useful anyway.

But, I also definitely do think there is something worse about someone who hates black people and uses a racial slur to describe them compared to a model trained on humanity doing the same, but certainly both are huge problems, and it can't slip my mind that the racist person was also just trained on humanity's racism

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