The one time a dev told me AI art was "just math" and I walked away

I was at a small meetup in Portland maybe 8 months ago, talking to a guy who built image generators. He kept saying my work on training data ethics was pointless because the outputs are just weights and biases. I showed him a dataset where 60% of the faces were from one demographic, and he shrugged. That moment made me realize the people building these tools sometimes don't care about what they're actually putting out into the world. Has anyone else run into this wall where creators just refuse to look at the bias in their own models?

3 comments

3 Comments

emmag221d ago

Did you catch that article about the Google image model that couldn't tell a happy person from an angry one because it was trained mostly on white faces? It's wild how people making these tools just don't want to hear it when you point out stuff like that. Have you seen any real changes happen after those kinds of reports?

emmawood1d ago

honestly the bigger issue nobody talks about is how these models get trained on user data after they launch. so if the initial training data is already messed up, and then users are giving feedback based on that same broken system, it just reinforces the bias. like, if a model can't tell moods right, the corrections people give it are probably also skewed by their own biases. it's a feedback loop that makes the problem harder to fix.

wesley3851d ago

Jump right into it. That whole attitude is just a FANCY way of saying "I don't want to be responsible for what I built." It's the same thing you see with people who make loud cars or leave their trash at a campsite. They figure if they can use "math" or "data" as a shield, they don't have to care about how it messes things up for everyone else. I see it all the time in everyday stuff. Like someone who owns a rental property that's falling apart and just says "the market decides the price" instead of fixing the mold. It's a way to hide from the real world consequences. People like that dev don't want to admit that their "just math" is shaping how people see themselves and others every single day.