5.3 - Computer Bias

Notes

Intentional vs Purposeful Bias

Google “What age groups use Facebook” vs “… TikTok”? What does the data say? Is there purposeful exclusion in these platforms? Is it harmful? Should it be corrected? Is it good business?

  • From what I found, the age groups for Facebook and for TikTok differ highly.
  • This has Facebook age averages are 25-34 years old while tiktok’s is 13 - 24. I think that this is due to the fact that the apps were created a t different times.
  • The people who use Facebook today were once teens, and since Facebook is older, it makes sense that the age demographic is also older. Facebook is around 10 years older than TikTok so it makes sense that the average age group is also around 10 years older. This is also due to low attention spans. TikTok has videos that are mostly under a minute, this keeps kids entertained for longer which generates TikTok more money. The common census of: “Just one more video” on tiktok leads to kids scrolling for hours.

Why do virtual assistants have female voices? Amazon, Alexa Google, Apple Siri. Was this purposeful? Is it harmful? Should it be corrected? Is it good business?

  • I think that the virtual assistants are female because on average, a female voice is found as more soothing.
  • There is no real problem with this but at the end of the day, it is just AI, so why not give it a robotic voice. It does not even need to be the ony voice, it could be set as default so that people can choose who they want to hear as their virtual assistant rather than defaulting to a female voice.

Talk about an algorithm that influences your decisions, think about these companies (ie FAANG - Facebook, Amazon, Apple,Netflix, Google)

  • An algorithm that influences my decisions is probably Instagram. There are notifications that say: “See what you missed out on” which makes me feel as if I did miss out on something. This leads to me opening the app which generates Instagram money. So this algorithm by Instagram as well as many others I presume, influence my decisions greatly. There are also algorithms that track what you are interested in, this leads to you getting hooked on new data that you like, while removing what you dislike.

HP Smart Video

Does the owner of the computer think this was intentional?

  • I do not think that the owner belives that it was intentional. Just that the designers at HP only used caucasian test subjects. THat or they excluded many people of color when performing said tests. If yes or no, justify you conclusion.
  • No: This is because the video seemed satirical, poking fun at HP’s shortcomings. How do you think this happened?
  • I think that this occured because the developments at HP had testing with only caucasians or excluding many people of color. Is this harmful? Was it intended to be harmful or exclude? Should it be corrected? What would you or should you do to produce a better outcome?

Obtaining Data via Crowdsourcing

Analyzing crowd data helps us make decisions. Exam top 10 to 20. Did you see anything interesting?

  • I Have seen that the top 20ish data sets show data that people would actually use. There is nothing about the average amount of legs ona chair, nobody needs to know that. Rather, there is data about new cars, something that people would use.

Hacks

CompSci has 150 ish principles students. Describe a crowdsource idea and how you might initiate it in our environment?

  • We could use it as a punishment, in which students who do not behave are forced to complete the tasks, this could be added as a punishment that is explained in class. What about Del Norte crowdsourcing? Could your project be better with crowdsourcing?
  • We could use it where students who don’t throw away their trashed are forced to pick up the trash at the end of class. What kind of data could you capture at N@tM to make evening interesting? Perhaps use this data to impress Teachers during finals week.
  • I would probably take data on what people are wearing as I saw some students dress up while others were in pajamas.