- cross-posted to:
- technology@lemmy.world
- cross-posted to:
- technology@lemmy.world
From Pretraining Data to Language Models to Downstream Tasks: Tracking the Trails of Political Biases Leading to Unfair NLP Models https://aclanthology.org/2023.acl-long.656.pdf
Technology is not apolitical, because humans are not apolitical. Anyone who says they are or claims to be “neutral” or “centrist” simply means their ideals align with the status quo.
This is a problem with all sectors of tech, but especially in places where algorithms have to be trained. For example, facial recognition systems are notoriously biased against anyone who isn’t cis and white. Fitness trackers/smart watches/etc. have trouble with darker skin tones. Developers encode implicit biases because they are oblivious to the fact that their experiences aren’t universal. If your dev team and your company at large aren’t diverse, that lack of diversity is going to show through in your product, intentional or not. How you shape the algorithms, what data you feed it to train it, etc. are all affected by those things.
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There’s a great video about this sort of thing: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=agzNANfNlTs
Essentially, it looks at why conservatives vs. liberals approach the world differently. Democracy vs. capitalism is inherently a logical contradiction; in a true democracy, everyone is treated equally and all voices have equal weights. In capitalism, some people are more equal than others - it’s a pyramid. Fascism is when these “some people are better” is because of something like genetics, or culture. (The video doesn’t touch on this, but modern Communism falls into the same trap as well, where “some people are better” because they know the party leaders or they’re technocrats. It’s a mindset that humans have and not something exclusive to capitalism.)
Where you wind up on the American political spectrum is based on where you fall when the ideals of equality vs. hierarchy clash. There is no middle ground because the two are fundamentally incompatible - if everyone was truly treated equally, you couldn’t have people with more power/status than others. If you accept that not everyone should wield power and that at the end of the day there must be some rich and some poor - some that have power and others that do not - then you are therefore arguing that people shouldn’t be treated equally. From there, the pyramid structure is the natural order of things (“always a bigger fish”).
Because the structure is fundamentally at odds with itself you can’t have both at once. You have to compromise on one side more than the other. Hence there is no such thing as “apolitical”, even with technology - it will hold a bias one way or the other.
That video really is great.
And you really nailed it. This is why I can’t stand the rhetoric of “can’t we put politics aside and agree to disagree?” because the answer is “if your ideals are at odds with equality, and you deny the basic human nature, human rights, and civil rights of others, then no. We can’t.” There’s no middle ground between “we want everyone to be happy, healthy, and be able to live comfortably as their true selves” and “these entire groups of people need to be eradicated”/
And bring it back, the “can’t we put politics aside” is a symbol of privilege. The “neutrality” or “centrism” that aligns with one’s ideals allows them to not have to worry about whether or not you’re going to be beaten to death the next time you have to go to the store, or if the police are going to stop you for just walking down the street and murder you because some facial recognition system mis-identified you because no one trained it on Black faces. Or if you’ve already had a hard time getting a job you want because of who you are, and now capitalists in that field have decided that they’re going to just bulldoze the whole thing and give the job to an LLM.
I’d add the caveat that some technologies are more political than others, too.
Or frequently “I actually find politics too boring and complicated but don’t want to admit it”.