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Happy Sunday − and welcome to the best of The Conversation U.S. Here are a few of our recently published stories:
Garbage in, garbage out. People have long used that expression to describe how poor-quality inputs – whether data, food or anything else – tend to produce bad outputs. And it’s as true for generative artificial intelligence as for anything else. With AI, the main concern I’ve read about is how to avoid infecting the machine with human biases such as racial and gender prejudices. But there’s another source for errors in human judgment: noise. And that data is being fed into AI systems.
Noise refers to variation in how people make judgments of the same problem or situation, explains Mayank Kejriwal, a computer scientist at the University of Southern California, in one of the articles published last week that our regular readers most enjoyed. Well-researched examples include judges issuing different judgments for a similar case – sometimes depending on the weather or the winner of a local football game – and insurance adjusters offering different estimates for comparable claims. And if noise is in the human-generated data, that same noise will likely end up in ChatGPT or any other generative AI program, resulting in messy answers to even
seemingly commonsense questions.
“Researchers still don’t know whether or how to weigh AI’s answers in that situation,” Kejriwal writes, “but a first step is acknowledging that the problem exists.”
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Mayank Kejriwal, University of Southern California
Just as human biases show up in machine learning systems, so, too, do people’s vagaries and vicissitudes.
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Kristine Hoover, Gonzaga University; Yolanda Gallardo, Gonzaga University
It can be easy to mistake feelings like fear and anger as hate. When biases are acted out in harmful ways, however, speaking up can help stop hate from getting worse.
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Steven Dashiell, Morgan State University
The Black hosts of the ‘Fresh & Fit’ podcast speak in the parlance of social justice movements, but apply it, in a twisted way, to justify misogyny.
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David Cason, University of North Dakota
Ardent segregationist Lester Maddox became governor of Georgia after earning the admiration of white voters by refusing to integrate his chicken restaurant.
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Charlie Hunt, Boise State University
Very few Americans believe Congress is doing a good job. Some of them have a simple solution: Throw the bums out and institute term limits. But that creates more problems than it solves.
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Nikki Crowley, Penn State
Singer Amy Winehouse died from alcohol toxicity in 2011, the same year that the American Society of Addiction Medicine publicly recognized addiction as a brain disorder.
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Jessica Hines, Whitman College
Medieval writers and clerics condemned queer romance and gender-bending stories − but were often wary of even mentioning the topics.
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Christopher Wong Michaelson, University of St. Thomas; Jennifer Tosti-Kharas, Babson College
A philosopher and a psychologist break down the challenges of finding purposeful work that also pays well.
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Edlin Veras, Swarthmore College
With legal routes to the US curtailed, many Haitians are looking to cross the border into the Dominican Republic − but a shaky reception awaits.
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Rogelio Sáenz, The University of Texas at San Antonio; Selene M. Gomez, The University of Texas at San Antonio
Comparing states’ populations on a range of demographic and socioeconomic data reveals similarities and differences across the nation.
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News Quiz 🧠
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Fritz Holznagel, The Conversation
Test your knowledge with a weekly quiz drawn from some of our favorite stories. Questions this week on graduation, pollination and carbonation
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