Forget Privacy: You're Terrible at Targeting Anyway
Saved by Alex Dobrenko and
This is, by the way, the dirty secret of the machine learning movement: almost everything produced by ML could have been produced, more cheaply, using a very dumb heuristic you coded up by hand, because mostly the ML is trained by feeding it examples of what humans did while following a very dumb heuristic. There's no magic here. If you use ML to teach a computer how to sort through resumes, it will recommend you interview people with male, white-sounding names, because it turns out that's what your HR department already does. If you ask it what video a person like you wants to see next, it will recommend some political propaganda crap, because 50% of the time 90% of the people do watch that next, because they can't help themselves, and that's a pretty good success rate.
Saved by Alex Dobrenko and
Since the generative AIs have been trained on the entirety of human work — most of it mediocre — it produces “wisdom of the crowd”-like results. They may hit the mark but only because they are average.
In little more than a decade, machine learning has moved from a highly specialized technique to something that almost anyone with data and computational power can do. That is to be welcomed — yet it remains essential that the industry can navigate both the proliferation of tools and frameworks in the space and the ethical issues that are becoming
... See moreThere is a broad assumption underlying many machine-learning models that the model itself will not change the reality it’s modeling. In almost all cases, this is false.
both beautiful and tragic. It is beautiful because on a good day it requires very little work; you often don’t need to spend much time on the pesky job of feature engineering, and in the best case the machine takes care of a large fraction of what needs to be done. It is tragic because nothing ever guarantees that any system in the real world will
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