AI resurrects the ancient contest of the Platonic normative school versus the Aristotelian descriptive school

Nothing new under the sun. From Microsoft aims to lie to their AI to reduce sexist bias by Surur.

Researchers from Boston University and Microsoft showed that software trained on text collected from Google News would form connections such as “Man is to computer programmer as woman is to homemaker.”

Another study found when AI was trained on two large sets of photos, consisting of more than 100,000 images of complex scenes drawn from the web, labelled by humans with descriptions, the AI developed strong associations between women and domestic items and men and technology and outdoor activities.

In the COCO dataset, kitchen objects such as spoons and forks were strongly associated with women, while outdoor sporting equipment such as snowboards and tennis rackets, and technology items such as keyboards and computer mice were very strongly associated with men.

In fact, the AI’s biases were even stronger than the dataset itself, leading it to be much more likely to identify a person in a kitchen as a woman even if it was a man.

Such biases, if detected, can be corrected with additional training, but there are significant risks that a AI model may slip into production without all such issues being resolved.

AI is forcing a lot of ancient civilizational philosophical questions back to the fore. In this case, the conversation is about the distinction between Normative philosophies and Descriptive philosophies.

Descriptive philosophy (also known as positive philosophy) is the attempt to describe the world as it is. It contains no explicit moral judgment of a statement, simply whether the statement is true or not. "Group X is six inches shorter than Group Y on average" is a descriptive statement that is either true or not true. There is no judgment regarding whether it is a good thing to be taller or shorter.

Descriptive philosophy is a central pillar of Western Civilization and Aristotle is among the earliest practitioners of descriptive philosophy. Central to descriptive philosophy is the conviction that there is a knowable truth. Or in more colloquial and contemporary terms, "The truth is out there."

In contrast, normative philosophy is based on an evaluation of phenomena against some standard - how closely does it match to what should be rather than what is. "Group X should be six inches taller" is a normative statement. Plato is one of the earliest practitioners of normative philosophy, attempting in Book VI of The Republic to describe how an ideal state should be governed. This contrasted with Aristotle's approach in Politics which centered on a description of the different types of governance model which could be seen to actually exist.

In very broad strokes, Aristotle and Plato represent two different schools of western philosophy, what is versus what should be. The latter is more utopian and is often associated with authoritarianism (bringing people into compliance with what a central authority has determined to be desirable.) It is a lot more complex than that but it is fundamental divide.

It is fascinating to me to see these ancient philosophical divides being manifested in modern AI. Do we try and emulate the world as it is (which will manifest truths we may not like) or do we try and force AI to model a system that gives us the answers we like but which does not reflect reality?

I know where I would put my money. The Gods of the Copybook Headings have little tolerance for normative thinking.