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If you want the model to understand what a "nurse" actually is, then it shouldn't be associated with female.
If you want the model to understand how the word "nurse" is usually used, without regard for what a "nurse" actually is, then associating it with female is fine.
The issue with a correlative model is that it can easily be self-reinforcing.
I'd say that bias is only an issue if it's unable to respond to additional nuance in the input text. For example, if I ask for a "male nurse" it should be able to generate the less likely combination. Same with other races, hair colors, etc... Trying to generate a model that's "free of correlative relationships" is impossible because the model would never have the infinitely pedantic input text to describe the exact output image.
I have a feeling that we need to be real with ourselves and solve problems and not paper over them. I feel like people generally expect search engines to tell them what's really there instead of what people wish were there. And if the engines do that, people can get agitated!
I'd almost say that hurt feelings are prerequisite for real change, hard though that may be.
These are all really interesting questions brought up by this technology, thanks for your thoughts. Disclaimer, I'm a fucking idiot with no idea what I'm talking about.
1. The model provides a reflection of reality, as politically inconvenient and hurtful as it may be.
2. The model provides an intentionally obfuscated version with either random traits or non correlative traits.
3. The model refuses to answer.
Which of these is ideal to you?
This is a far cry from say the USA where that would instantly trigger a response since until the 1960s there was a widespread race based segregation.
Randomly pick one.
> Trying to generate a model that's "free of correlative relationships" is impossible because the model would never have the infinitely pedantic input text to describe the exact output image.
Sure, and you can never make a medical procedure 100% safe. Doesn't mean that you don't try to make them safer. You can trim the obvious low hanging fruit though.
How does the model back out the "certain people would like to pretend it's a fair coin toss that a randomly selected nurse is male or female" feature?
It won't be in any representative training set, so you're back to fishing for stock photos on getty rather than generating things.
I say this because I’ve been visiting a number of childcare centres over the past few days and I still have yet to see a single male teacher.
You're ignoring that these models are stochastic. If I ask for a nurse and always get an image of a woman in scrubs, then yes, the model exhibits bias. If I get a male nurse half the time, we can say the model is unbiased WRT gender, at least. The same logic applies to CEOs always being old white men, criminals always being Black men, and so on. Stochastic models can output results that when aggregated exhibit a distribution from which we can infer bias or the lack thereof.
This depends on the application. As an example, it would be a problem if it's used as a CV-screening app that's implicitly down-ranking male-applicants to nurse positions, resulting in fewer interviews for them.
Put another way, when we ask for an output optimized for "nursiness", is that not a request for some ur stereotypical nurse?
That's excessively simplified but wouldn't this drop the stereotype and better reflect reality?
Your description is closer to how the open source CLIP+GAN models did it - if you ask for “tree” it starts growing the picture towards treeness until it’s all averagely tree-y rather than being “a picture of a single tree”.
It would be nice if asking for N samples got a diversity of traits you didn’t explicitly ask for. OpenAI seems to solve this by not letting you see it generate humans at all…
What percent of people should be rendered as white people with broccoli hair? What if you request green people. Or broccoli haired people. Or white broccoli haired people? Or broccoli haired nazis?
It gets hard with these conditional probabilities
I expect that in the practical limit of scale achievable, the regularization pressure inherent to the process of training these models converges to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minimum_description_length and the correlative relationships become optimized away, leaving mostly true causal relationships inherent to data-generating process.
Perhaps what "nurse" means isn't what "nurse" should mean, but what people mean when they say "nurse" is what "nurse" means.
That’s a distinction without a difference. Meaning is use.
> We investigated sex differences in 473,260 adolescents’ aspirations to work in things-oriented (e.g., mechanic), people-oriented (e.g., nurse), and STEM (e.g., mathematician) careers across 80 countries and economic regions using the 2018 Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA). We analyzed student career aspirations in combination with student achievement in mathematics, reading, and science, as well as parental occupations and family wealth. In each country and region, more boys than girls aspired to a things-oriented or STEM occupation and more girls than boys to a people-oriented occupation. These sex differences were larger in countries with a higher level of women's empowerment. We explain this counter-intuitive finding through the indirect effect of wealth. Women's empowerment is associated with relatively high levels of national wealth and this wealth allows more students to aspire to occupations they are intrinsically interested in.
Source: https://psyarxiv.com/zhvre/ (HN discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29040132)
Are the logical divisions you make in your mind really indicative of anything other than your arbitrary personal preferences?
And anyway - contextually -, the representational natures of "use" (instances) and that of "meaning" (definition) are completely different.
