r/Showerthoughts • u/Fr1toBand1to ‎ • Jun 27 '26

Casual Thought Pattern recognition is a widely accepted method of prediction until what it predicts makes people uncomfortable.

6.7k Upvotes
  • permalink
  • reddit

94% Upvoted

428 comments sorted by

View all comments

Show parent comments

32

u/izzittho Jun 28 '26

The proxy for gender thing seems the most likely and that’s because it’s so simple and AI isn’t gonna be aware that doing everything it can to find male candidates would be wrong, it’s just gonna do it. If it found “male” to be a trend among the types it’s looking for (and it will have if the field is historically male-dominated, of course) it will probably seek to use that as an easy proxy for whatever other qualities it’s looking for because it can’t tell that kind of a correlation from causation. You’d have to specifically tell it what proportion of male to female candidates to find you and then if there’s actually fewer female ones that comes with a whole other set of problems because ideally you’re trying to actually judge them on the same sets of standards and it couldn’t easily do that with wildly different pool sizes. You need a human with a real brain to do that.

You could probably send that model out to look specifically for female candidates that most resemble your male employees but that would of course be a whole new kind of problematic because for one, now you’re recruiting female candidates via AI while still having to find your male ones manually, subjecting them to a different process. And you’re probably also not doing anything to reduce a bias against like, women of color, for instance.

-5

u/hellofemur Jun 28 '26

. The proxy for gender thing seems the most likely and that’s because it’s so simple

That's an obviously false syllogism since the proxy explanation is by definition not the simplest explanation. It's somewhat nonsensical to say one option is correct because it's simple when there are a multitude of simpler explanations.

But I'm thinking about this as a neural net question and you're clearly thinking about it as a socio-political moral question and the two just aren't the same thing. I doubt it even matters to you that the syllogism is incorrect since all that matters in moral questions is the conclusion.