MIT just had to remove a major AI dataset that was used to teach hundreds of AIs. It had numerous examples of black people and monkeys labeled with the N-word and has trained systematic bias into our algorithms. This type of bias cannot be fought by hiding from the problem. What Airbnb is doing is courageous and you are free to opt-out if you don’t like it, but taking a big public stand against an organization for actually trying to improve things for minorities in 2020 is pretty tone deaf.
> but taking a big public stand against an organization for actually trying to improve things for minorities in 2020 is pretty tone deaf
From the email: "we’ll use first names and profile photos from hosts and guests to help us understand the perceived race someone might associate with them...We’ll use this information to help us understand when and where racial discrimination is happening on our platform."
So if I get rejected for trying to book a room, my brown face will be labeled "minority" and be used as a datapoint to help improve the company. I have every right to disagree with how Airbnb is going about this especially from a privacy perspective, and do so vocally.
I don’t think anyone would complain if it was implemented as an opt-in.
