They fixate on white racists while ignoring (eg) the Christmas parade attack — leading to society developing a bias in their beliefs about racism.
I always take these criticism of AI as confession-through-projection of the misdeeds people have engaged in already.
Every institution has biases, and blindly trusting a dataset from e.g. a police department is just as bad as blindly trusting data from CNN or Fox News. The collection, aggregation, and sharing of data is a biased operation. If a political or for-profit entity gives you data, it's going to be data that supports their agenda.
It takes active, conscious effort to combat that bias, in the same way that it takes active, conscious effort to not just get all your news from one source. The concern (which has been demonstrated) is that that isn't being done
I often see that argument made in bad faith, eg when someone who believes conclusions from biased data encounters AIs making data driven conclusions, more than I do when the AI is genuinely biased.
I also have trouble taking it seriously, since that same standard isn’t applied to existing information services (eg, “media ethics” posts condemning their open racism) — only to new information services which might disrupt the current social order.
I should have stated that more directly — but I view these concerns largely as after the fact ethical nits from people whose comfortable myths are confronted by data, projecting their own manipulative behavior onto others.
And many people do criticise the biases of legacy media groups on both sides. But this is an article about AI on a site that is generally more concerned with technical innovations than societal issues, so AI is being criticized.
Besides, bad things existing now isn't really a good argument for why we shouldn't prevent bad things from happening in the future.
> In 2019, race was reported for 6,406 known hate crime offenders. Of these offenders:
> 52.5 percent were White.
> 23.9 percent were Black or African American.
https://ucr.fbi.gov/hate-crime/2019/topic-pages/offenders
White people don’t commit disproportionately many hate crimes — black people do. According to the FBI.