Humanist Discussion Group, Vol. 37, No. 73.
        Department of Digital Humanities, University of Cologne
                      Hosted by DH-Cologne
                       www.dhhumanist.org
                Submit to: humanist@dhhumanist.org




        Date: 2023-06-04 23:40:22+00:00
        From: Henry Schaffer <hes@ncsu.edu>
        Subject: Re: [Humanist] 37.71: studies of algorithmic prejudice: surprised?

What does "built by homo sapiens sapiens" mean with respect to AI/LLM
such as ChatGPT? Yes, people built ChatGPT (which I'll use as an exemplar
for that genre) but they didn't build in prejudice - or rather, they didn't
do that directly. ChatGPT is "trained" on data scraped from the
Internet/Web (perhaps 300 billion words) - and then its responses to
prompts are based on the words and their relationships in that data. Humans
aren't selecting how it responds beyond having obtained that data, and in
putting in some restraints to avoid ChatGPT from giving some types of
responses.

  I guess I'm being picky, but should biases in the material on the Web be
considered to be human prejudices built into ChatGPT's?

--henry

On Sun, Jun 4, 2023 at 1:49 AM Humanist <humanist@dhhumanist.org> wrote:

>
>               Humanist Discussion Group, Vol. 37, No. 71.
>         Department of Digital Humanities, University of Cologne
>                       Hosted by DH-Cologne
>                        www.dhhumanist.org
>                 Submit to: humanist@dhhumanist.org
>
>
>
>
>         Date: 2023-06-03 05:34:43+00:00
>         From: Willard McCarty <willard.mccarty@mccarty.org.uk>
>         Subject: studies of algorithmic prejudice: surprised?
>
> Here's a serious follow-up question--with thanks to Tim Smithers, Robin
> Burke and others for the responses to my inquiry. Very helpful indeed.
> But looking at what I and others have written, I wonder why the
> detection and exposure of this (artificially unconscious) prejudice,
> however correct and thoroughly pursued, is so unsatisfying? By analogy
> to other, older sorts of crime, I wonder why the surprise that something
> built by homo sapiens sapiens turns out to bring with it, as it gets
> technically better and better, more and more of the imprint of its
> origins?
> And then I wonder about the drive to rigorous perfection and purity in
> the digital, frustrated like all those that have preceded it. What is to
> be learned from all this?
>
> That there is quite a role for the digital humanities to play?
>
> Other questions most welcome.
>
> Yours,
> WM
> --
> Willard McCarty,
> Professor emeritus, King's College London;
> Editor, Interdisciplinary Science Reviews;  Humanist
> www.mccarty.org.uk



_______________________________________________
Unsubscribe at: http://dhhumanist.org/Restricted
List posts to: humanist@dhhumanist.org
List info and archives at at: http://dhhumanist.org
Listmember interface at: http://dhhumanist.org/Restricted/
Subscribe at: http://dhhumanist.org/membership_form.php