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dojan ,
@dojan@lemmy.world avatar

Advocates: take survivors of abuse seriously.
Society: Let’s have computers tell us what to do!

I mean I guess the risk of repeated murder-suicide is pretty low…

NutWrench ,
@NutWrench@lemmy.world avatar

The police accepted the software’s judgment and Ms. Hemid went home with no further protection.

This is what happens when you rely on your Nintendos, instead of using your damn brains.

IsThisAnAI ,

I have no issues with using ML to predict outcomes. It’s going to be wrong sometimes, so will humans. The system just needs review and input from humans understanding the model.

Leate_Wonceslace ,
@Leate_Wonceslace@lemmy.dbzer0.com avatar

Pedantic Mathematician here.

If it failed, then it was a heuristic, rather than an algorithm.

Clearly, that’s the most important thing about this post.

You’re welcome.

silence7 OP ,

Pretty much anything trying to predict human behavior is a heuristic; people using them as if they’ve got some kind of certainty is a problem.

Leate_Wonceslace ,
@Leate_Wonceslace@lemmy.dbzer0.com avatar

Yes, exactly.

technocrit ,

Why not both? A bad algorithm based on bad heuristics? There are many many algorithms that fail at what they’re supposed to do.

As a non-condescending “mathematician”, I’m happy to help.

dinckelman ,

Why do we live in a dystopian hellscape

technocrit ,

Capitalism.

Norgur ,
@Norgur@fedia.io avatar

I really have a hard time deciding if that is the scandal the article makes it out to be (although there is some backpedaling going on). The crucial point is: 8% of the decisions turn out to be wrong or misjudged. The article seems to want us to think that the use of the algorithm is to blame. Yet, is it? Is there evidence that a human would have judged those cases differently?
Is there evidence that the algorithm does a worse job than humans? If not, then the article devolves onto blatant fear mongering and the message turns from "algorithm is to blame for deaths" into "algorithm unable to predict the future in 100% of cases", which of course it can't...

TimeSquirrel ,
@TimeSquirrel@kbin.melroy.org avatar

Thank you, this is why I came to the Fediverse from Reddit.

IsThisAnAI ,

IMO this place is far more an echo chamber than Reddit. Both places have their share of team based opinions but reddits diversity IMO is better at surfacing it.

sunzu ,

Critical thinking spotted, proper authorities have been notified.

We will fix you!

Vanth ,
@Vanth@reddthat.com avatar

I also wonder if the algorithm is being used to override the victim.

Like if she asked for help, if she didn’t want to go home and wanted to go to a shelter and get a restraining order. But they said, “low risk, nope, no resources for you”. Depending on her situation, home to her abuser may have been her only option then. In which case, this is a level of horror the article didn’t cover. The article really doesn’t explain how the risk level output by the algorithm is used. I’m having a difficult time with this article too.

madsen ,

The article mentions that one woman (Stefany González Escarraman) went for a restraining order the day after the system deemed her at “low risk” and the judge denied it referring to the VioGen score.

One was Stefany González Escarraman, a 26-year-old living near Seville. In 2016, she went to the police after her husband punched her in the face and choked her. He threw objects at her, including a kitchen ladle that hit their 3-year-old child. After police interviewed Ms. Escarraman for about five hours, VioGén determined she had a negligible risk of being abused again.

The next day, Ms. Escarraman, who had a swollen black eye, went to court for a restraining order against her husband. Judges can serve as a check on the VioGén system, with the ability to intervene in cases and provide protective measures. In Ms. Escarraman’s case, the judge denied a restraining order, citing VioGén’s risk score and her husband’s lack of criminal history.

About a month later, Ms. Escarraman was stabbed by her husband multiple times in the heart in front of their children.

It also says:

Spanish police are trained to overrule VioGén’s recommendations depending on the evidence, but accept the risk scores about 95 percent of the time, officials said. Judges can also use the results when considering requests for restraining orders and other protective measures.

You could argue that the problem isn’t so much the algorithm itself as it is the level of reliance upon it. The algorithm isn’t unproblematic though. The fact that it just spits out a simple score: “negligible”, “low”, “medium”, “high”, “extreme” is, IMO, an indicator that someone’s trying to conflate far too many factors into a single dimension. I have a really hard time believing that anyone knowledgeable in criminal psychology and/or domestic abuse would agree that 35 yes or no questions would be anywhere near sufficient to evaluate the risk of repeated abuse. (I know nothing about domestic abuse or criminal psychology, so I could be completely wrong.)

Apart from that, I also find this highly problematic:

[The] victims interviewed by The Times rarely knew about the role the algorithm played in their cases. The government also has not released comprehensive data about the system’s effectiveness and has refused to make the algorithm available for outside audit.

Fubarberry ,
@Fubarberry@sopuli.xyz avatar

It reminds me of the debate around self driving cars. Tesla has a flawed implementation of self driving tech, that’s trying to gather all the information it needs through camera inputs vs using multiple sensor types. This doesn’t always work, and has led to some questionable crashes where it definitely looks like a human driver could have avoided the crash.

However, even with Tesla’s flawed self driving, They’re supposed to have far fewer wrecks than humans driving. According to Tesla’s safety report, Tesla’s in self driving mode average 5-6 million miles per accident vs 1-1.5 million miles for Tesla drivers not using self driving (US average is 500-750k miles per accident).

So a system like this doesn’t have to be perfect to do a far better job than people can, but that doesn’t mean it won’t feel terrible for the unlucky people who things go poorly for.

ShittyBeatlesFCPres ,

That report fails to take into account that the Cybertruck is already a wreck when it rolls off the assembly line.

technocrit ,

Wow Tesla said that Tesla was safe!?!? This changes everything.

OhNoMoreLemmy ,

Unfortunately, this is bad statistics.

The Teslas in self driving mode tend to be used on main roads, and most accidents per mile happen on the small side streets. People are also much safer where Teslas are driven than the these statistics suggest.

nalinna ,

Could a human have judged it better? Maybe not. I think a better question to ask is, “Should anyone be sent back into a violent domestic situation with no additional protection, no matter the calculated risk?” And as someone who has been on the receiving end of that conversation and later narrowly escaped a total-family-annihilation situation, I would say no…no one should be told that, even though they were in a terrifying, life-threatening situation, they will not be provided protection, and no further steps will be taken to keep them from being injured again, or from being killed next time. But even without algorithms, that happens constantly…the only thing the algorithm accomplishes is that the investigator / social worker / etc doesn’t have to have any kind of personal connection with the victim, so they don’t have to feel some kind of way for giving an innocent person a death sentence because they were just doing what the computer told them to.

Final thought: When you pair this practice with the ongoing conversation around the legality of women seeking divorce without their husband’s consent, you have a terrifying and consistently deadly situation.

Vanth ,
@Vanth@reddthat.com avatar

Final thought: When you pair this practice with the ongoing conversation around the legality of women seeking divorce without their husband’s consent, you have a terrifying and consistently deadly situation.

Louder for anyone in the back in the US thinking it doesn’t sound so bad when Republicans like Josh Hawley and JD Vance call for an end to no-fault divorces.

That’s right, one of our VP candidates wants to disallow people from divorcing their abusive partners without jumping through hoops that will take months if not years, and leaves them susceptible to their abusive partner, now even angrier than before that the victim would dare try to leave.

nalinna ,

Yep. The ones who manage to slip notes to their veterinarian to help them get away are the exception.

silence7 OP ,

My impression from the article is more that they’re not doing any kind of garbage-in assessment: nobody is making sure they’re getting answers about the right person (eg: some women date more than one guy) and some women don’t feel safe giving accurate answers to the police, and there aren’t good failsafes available for when it’s wrong; you’re forced to hire legal counsel and pursue a change via the courts.

nalinna ,

That and, their action for low-risk is all wrong. The stakes are too high to not give someone help, regardless of the risk level.

RobotToaster ,
@RobotToaster@mander.xyz avatar

An algorithm is never to blame, some pencil necked desk jockey decided the criteria to get help that was used to create the algorithm, the blame is entirely on them.

That said, I doubt it would make any difference if a human was in the loop. An algorithm is still al algorithm, even if it’s applied by a human. We usually just call that a “policy” though. People have been murdered by the paper sea for decades before we started calling it “algorithms”.

yesman ,

The article is not about how the AI is responsible for the death. It’s likely that the woman would have died in the counterfactual.

The question is not “how effective is AI”? The question is should life or death decisions be made by an electrified Oracle at Delphi. You must answer this question before “is AI effective” becomes relevant.

If somebody was adjudicating traffic court with Tarot cards, would you ask: well how accurate are the cards compared to a judge?

jBlight ,

Minority Report: the beta test

sunzu ,

Our pigs don't look as good as [generic Hollywood actor]

DeathbringerThoctar ,

https://y.yarn.co/f5adfba3-1537-405d-919f-921f8a2137d2_text.gif

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