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Comment by lolinder | Hacker News Reader

I'm as sick of AI nonsense as anyone and I'm a chronic Mozilla critic (I mostly wish they'd just accept my donations for Firefox and focus exclusively on that). That said, this post is over the top.

If you read the blog post it's pretty obvious what happened. Someone at Mozilla.ai had an extra day on their hands and ran a bunch of text they'd collected through a few models. They thought "hey, this is kind of cool, let's make a blog post about it". Then they wrote one stupid line about their motivations (likely made up to justify playing around with local models) and get completely lambasted for that one stupid line.

I'd rather live in a world where people are comfortable throwing together a quick blog post detailing a fun/stupid project they did than one in which they do that anyway but are hesitant to share because people will rake them over the coals for being "unserious".

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> Then they wrote one stupid line about their motivations (likely made up to justify playing around with local models) and get completely lambasted for that one stupid line.

to be fair, it's worth lambasting them over it because they are perpetuating the myth that AI is bias free (which a lot of people actually do believe!) and putting the weight of mozilla's reputation behind it

Yeah, I think the only real problem with this is that it was posted under the auspices of Mozilla's official foundation. If it was a personal blog post, it'd be just fine.

thanks but my reputation already has a colorway

On the flip side: A lot of claims of AI bias are overblown and/or straight-up disingenuous.

Remember when ProPublica claimed that recidivism prediction models were biased against black people? (https://www.propublica.org/article/how-we-analyzed-the-compa...)

They rigged their analysis. There are two different fairness metrics - individual and group-based - that cannot possibly be fulfilled at the same time if there is any difference between the groups. (https://arxiv.org/abs/1609.05807v2)

The model was fair all along according to individual metrics. ProPublica picked their fairness metric so as to make the model appear biased. The whole thing was a lie.

> On the flip side: A lot of claims of AI bias are overblown and/or straight-up disingenuous.

The same is true regarding humans though, so "use a magic ai to avoid bias from humans" still doesn't make any sense.

> If you read the blog post it's pretty obvious what happened. Someone at Mozilla.ai had an extra day on their hands and ran a bunch of text they'd collected through a few models.

That's certainly a possibility, but the post sure looks like it's trying to claim otherwise.

Agreed. Not sure why author is so enraged.

By going on the official blog Mozilla is putting their reputation behind it, be it one person or a team.

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