Elon Musk’s decision to fire almost half of Twitter’s staff might have serious negative effects on the business. Full teams were either abolished or reduced to a skeleton staff as part of the mass layoffs. One such team was Twitter’s ML Ethics, Transparency, and Accountability team (also known as the META team), which consisted of about 20 individuals and was tasked with improving the transparency and objectivity of Twitter’s algorithms.
Twitter could not be reached for comment right away. Axios reports that all but one member of Twitter’s communications team has been fired.
The META team, which he described as a leader in the tech community in ethical AI, was fired by Musk, according to Ramayya Krishnan, dean of Carnegie Mellon University’s Heinz College of Information Systems and Public Policy. Ramayya Krishnan believes this was a grave mistake because machine learning is essential to the operation of Twitter.
But what precisely is moral AI? In essence, it involves cleaning up algorithms to get rid of any bias or injustice. Although Krishnan asserts that any sort of data-driven organization could suffer unintended repercussions if they don’t deliberately use machine learning, Twitter is a company that clearly needs ethical, accountable machine learning. According to Krishnan, If you were hiring for a software engineering position and employed a bad algorithm to scan all the resumes, it might look at previous hiring trends and automatically dismiss the female applicants.
The META team was granted the freedom to publicly discuss their findings with the rest of the world because their major goal was to increase user confidence in Twitter’s algorithms. According to Krishnan, one of the team’s greatest successes was improving the Twitter image cropping algorithm, which had been discovered to routinely crop out black faces in pictures uploaded to the platform. The team also conducted a study that revealed that right-leaning news sources typically gain more from Twitter’s algorithm than left-leaning sources in addition to their findings about the image cropping algorithm.
Krishnan claims that the impact of Twitter’s termination of the META team won’t be as clear as one particular issue. He continued by saying that without ethical AI voices at the strategy table, Twitter would be more reactive when unanticipated problems arise as a result of the company’s algorithms being underdeveloped at launch. According to Krishnan, businesses may be proactive and thoughtfully evaluate their algorithms before they are made public and used. This is possible with an ethical AI team.
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