Thread by @geomblog

I was talking to a Ph.D student recently and they asked me (or at least I understood them to be asking) whether, in the light of the Google fiascos and what we're seeing right now with big tech and AI ethics in general whether there's any point in doing the work that I do. 1/n

I gave a brief answer at the time, to the effect of "the fact that we're seeing pushback means that our efforts are working", which felt a little unsatisfactory to me. But with @_KarenHao's brilliant new article on Facebook I feel like there's a more concrete shift. 2/n

"back in the day", when I first was talking to journalists about AI bias, I remember people saying, "well yeah, but this is all hypothetical. give me a real example where something happened and we'll talk". Similarly, most tech companies were like "AI Bias? Who dat?" 3/n

The ProPublica article on COMPAS changed the public discussion in ways it's hard to explain. But at the very least, it shifted the discourse to "AI Bias? Yeah society sucks, but it's not our problem, we're just tech people". Not a big shift, but wait....4/n.

Soon there were stories coming out every day about tech malfeasance when it came to the use of AI. And I saw the tone rapidly shift to "AI Bias. Yeah, that's a real problem, and it's really hard. We need to think about it, but do you want to kill the golden goose of tech? 5/n

The next big shift in comms was around the time of the laughably terrible Google ethics board, and then the FB oversight board. "AI Bias is a problem. It's a hard problem. We need external oversight that we will hire ourselves because we can be trusted" 6/n

Well that's not working out so well. But in addition, we had the new "Well we are the smartest people in tech, so who better to solve AI Bias (ed: yes, solve) than us. Here are all our awesome teams that will solve AI bias while writing tons of papers" 7/n

The big shift that I am beginning to see now with Karen's article is to "Hey we have amazing researchers doing stuff on AI Bias. What? they're telling us we are bad. FIRE THEM" or "Sorry, anything actually relevant is outside your purview" 8/n

There's no doubt there's a series of bobs and weaves here to avoid doing what is truly painful. But I can't look at this and not think - whatever the community of people thinking about this issue is doing, it's actually working. There's a long way to go no doubt. 9/n

And we should continue to expect a lot more expert comms FUD. But to get to this point is something. And I think one of the shining points of @_KarenHao's article is how she cleanly exposes the rhetorical games that are being played without overly simplifying. 10/n=10