Reminds me of an early application of AI where scientists were training an AI to tell the difference between a wolf and a dog. It got really good at it in the training data, but it wasn’t working correctly in actual application. So they got the AI to give them a heatmap of which pixels it was using more than any other to determine if a canine is a dog or a wolf and they discovered that the AI wasn’t even looking at the animal, it was looking at the surrounding environment. If there was snow on the ground, it said “wolf”, otherwise it said “dog”.
Early chess engine that used AI, were trained by games of GMs, and the engine would go out of its way to sacrifice the queen, because when GMs do it, it’s comes with a victory.
Reg, why’d you just stab yourself in the shoulder?
Ah cmon, ain’t ya ever seen a movie?
Well of course I’ve seen a movie, but what the hell are ya doing?
Every time the guy stabs himself in a movie, it’s right before he kicks the piss outta the guy he’s fightin’!
Well that don’t… when that happens, the guys gotta plan Reg, what the hell’s your plan?
I dunno, but I’m gonna find out!
Hot dog. Not hot dog
That’s funny because if I was trying to tell the difference between a wolf and a dog I would look for ‘is it in the woods?’ and ‘how big is it relative to what’s around it?’.
What about telling the difference between a wolf and grandmother?
Look for a bonnet. Wolves don’t wear bonnets.
Yeah, that’s a grandmother, so what?
The idea of AI automated job interviews sickens me. How little of a fuck do you have to give about applicants that you can’t even be bothered to have even a single person interview them??
But god forbid the applicant didn’t spend hours researching every little detail about a company, writing a perfect letter with information that could have just been bullet points and being able to explain exactly why they absolutely love the company and why it’s been their dream to work there since they were a child. Or even worse: Use AI to write the application.
Cover letters fucking make me hateful. I love generating AI cover letters and sending them. Fuck your cover letters in a market where you need to send 100 applications to get 10 bites
“oooo books he must be really smart”
That reminds me of the time, quite a few years ago, Amazon tried to automate resume screening. They trained a machine learning model with anonymized resumes and whether the candidate was hired. Then they looked at what the AI was looking at. The model had trained itself on how to reject women.
Another similar “shortcut” I’ve heard about was that a system that analyzed job performance determined that the two key factors were being named “Jared” and playing lacrosse in high school.
And, these are the easy-to-figure-out ones we know about.
If the bias is more complicated, it might never be spotted.
There’s a ton of great small scale things we can do with machine learning, and even LLM.
Unfortunately, it seems the main usages will be crushing people down even more.
One web LLM I was screwing around with had Job Interview as a preset. Ok. Played it totally straight the first time and had a totally positive outcome. Thought the interviewer way too agreeable. The next time I said the most inappropriate stuff I could imagine and still the interviewer agreed to come home with me to check out the rock collection I keep under my bed and listen to Captain Beefheart albums.
I’m amazed that no-one has complained that the graph’s data points are on the borders between categories rather than inside the category bars.
With that out of the way: WTF is wrong with that graph?
One of my favorite examples is when a company from India (I think?) trained their model to regulate subway gates. The system was supposed to analyze footage and open more gates when there were more people, and vice versa. It worked well until one holiday when there were no people, but all gates were open. They eventually discovered that the system was looking at the clock visible on the video, rather than the number of people.
Reminds me of the time a military algorithm was accidentally trained to conclude that tanks are only concealed in tree lines on overcast days.
This has job descrimination lawsuit written all over it.
“Bias automation” is kind of an accurate description for how our brains learn things too.
The base assumption is that you can tell anything reliable at all about a person from their body language, speech patterns, or appearance. So many people think they have an intuition for such things but pretty much every study of such things comes to the same conclusion: You can’t.
The reason why it doesn’t work is because the world is full of a diverse set of cultures, genetics, and subtle medical conditions. You may be able to attain something like 60% accuracy for certain personality traits from an interview if the person being interviewed was born and raised in the same type of environment/culture (and is the same sex) as you. Anything else is pretty much a guarantee that you’re going to get it wrong.
That’s why you should only ask interviewees empirical questions that can identify whether or not they have the requisite knowledge to do the job. For example, if you’re hiring an electrical engineer ask them how they would lay out a circuit board. Or if hiring a sales person ask them questions about how they would try to sell your specific product. Or if you’re hiring a union-busting expert person ask them how they sleep at night.
“Machine learning” is perfectly cromulent. The bias is what it learned, because that’s what it was taught. (Not intentionally, I don’t think. It’s just hard to get this stuff right sometimes.)
Job interviews are all bias regardless of whether they’re automated 😅
I’m really good at my job.
But that’s not why I got my job, it’s just a coincidence.
I got my job because I’m pretty good at interviews.
During the AI goldrush you can make your fortune selling bookshelves.
Selling bookshelf large poster, or just jpgs
Having a bookshelf poster behind you is actually a hilarious workaround.
I fucking hate that extraversion is a measured trait 🙄
I hate that they think bookshelves are an indicator for it
It’s from the OCEAN model of personality, which is currently the most widely accepted model. It’s received less criticism than myers-briggs and astrology.
It’s received less criticism than myers-briggs and astrology.
That’s not a high bar to meat.
I’m not working right now because I’m putting my daughter through online school. (Also due to an illness) She graduates in five years.
I am never getting another job, am I?
Just have a bookshelf behind you during the interview, you’ll be golden.
Or maybe have the oval office as a backdrop, that might really make you qualified.
Just get a bookshelf poster.
That shit works IRL too. Why do you think therapy practices often have themselves positioned in front of a wall of books? Not that it’s a bad thing; it’s good for outcomes to believe your therapist is competent and well educated.
