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ZorbaTHut  1yr ago (text post)   35183 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of September 19, 2022

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I wrote a post about de-biasing efforts in machine learning, which got a bit long, so I decided to turn it into an article instead. It's about how corporate anti-bias solutions are mostly only designed to cover their asses, and does nothing to solve the larger (actually important) issue.

(As an aside: does it still count as a "bare link" if I point to my own content, just hosted elsewhere?)

Well yes corporations just want to cover their asses from criticism, but the worst is that the criticism is so powerful that the discussion ends up shallow. I'm so annoyed that we had a cancellation of a language model that produced rap lyrics. FN Meka had a record contract which was later torn up because it was a "appropriator" using words reserved for someone with "lived experiences". It was just reported on and everyone glossed it over and forgot about. I'm like what did just happen? They cancelled a pile of math... There are slightly more deeper philosophical problems with the way it was cancelled. It cuts directly into postmodernism and its issues with treating the inauthentic the same as the authentic. Because at the end of the day the language model is just a mirror of the language used by those with the "lived experiences" and should be understood as such. https://youtube.com/watch?v=vYmfnfljvnM

My instinct is that the rap world would look down on a bunch of geeky mathletes who tried to write rap verses about being hard-ass gangsters regardless of whether they use an AI to do it or just pen and paper.

I looked into the youtube comments of FN Mekas music videos. There I found complaints of "inauthenticity" as in it wasn't very good. Which is not a surprise. The complaints highlighted in media is "robot racism" not that it sucks as rap. https://nypost.com/2022/08/24/capitol-records-severs-ties-with-virtual-rapper-fn-meka-after-outcry/

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