MIT and Being Smart

July 3, 2020

When I hear “MIT”, I think Jeffrey Epstein. Sorry. Imprinting at work. I read “MIT Apologizes, Permanently Pulls Offline Huge Dataset That Taught AI Systems to Use Racist, Misogynistic Slurs.” Yep, that the MIT which trains smart people today.

The write up reports:

Vinay Prabhu, chief scientist at UnifyID, a privacy startup in Silicon Valley, and Abeba Birhane, a PhD candidate at University College Dublin in Ireland, pored over the MIT database and discovered thousands of images labeled with racist slurs for Black and Asian people, and derogatory terms used to describe women. They revealed their findings in a paper undergoing peer review for the 2021 Workshop on Applications of Computer Vision conference.

Presumably the demise of Mr. Epstein prevented him from scrutinizing the dataset for appropriate candidates.

Error corrected. Apology emitted. Another outstanding example of academic excellence engraved in digital history.

Stephen E Arnold, July 3, 2020

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