MIT says AI discriminates.

by Angela K. Durden
Citizen Journalist. Business writer, novelist, songwriter, and Technology inventor protecting creator's copyrights. 

The opening sentence in the opening paragraph of the MIT Technology Review (Vol 120, No. 6) article entitled Another Way AI Programs Can Discriminate Against You, says, "All too often people make snap judgments based on how you speak. Some AI systems are also learning to be prejudiced against certain dialects."

Well, duh. [Hit the high hat, please.]

The article continues with this: "Anyone with a strong or unusual accent may know what it's like to have trouble being understood by Siri or Alexa."

[Cue the laugh track.]

I'm a Southern Woman — I mean that with all the pride the capitalizing of both words implies. But even I cannot understand most of the people in South Georgia when they talk. Their accent is so deep, and they rarely step outside their counties, their vernacular could rightly be called a completely separate dialect worthy of study by any self-respecting government-funded university.

But does anybody study them? They do not. Does the MIT article even mention those with a Southern accent? It does not. But it does mention the P-HWPCDLRSFC's* most-favored group: The African-American. The article got worse the further I read.

Researchers took 59.2 million tweets with a "high probability of containing African-American slang" and ran those through several natural-language processing tools. One popular tool identified those tweets as Danish...with a high level of confidence.

But did they ask if those 59.2 million tweets were generated by Chinese or Russian bots designed to mimic certain patterns and mess with the P-HWPCDLRSFCs' minds? On which authoritative work did they identify said slang? The one-page article did not say, but it would be a fair assumption that researchers did not ask that question, and probably googled an online urban dictionary to build their initial reference data set.

The article then proceeds to devolve into even more sad violin playing wrapped in dire warnings the condescending subtext of which is "We need to train AI to care for the Little Black Chillens so that we, of the more enlightened and erudite of accents that computers can understand, will be able to consider what the group members say in order to bring it into the conversation at the grown-ups' table."

Now that is discrimination.

*P-HWPCDLRSFC = Pussy-Hat Wearing Politically Correct Democrat Liberal RINO Socialist Fascist Commie