My most recent weblog post was on teaching ethics to self-driving cars, flippantly titled At least they’re not using GTA as a data source. Except….
Self-Driving Cars Can Learn a Lot by Playing Grand Theft Auto
Let’s console ourselves that “there’s little chance of a computer learning bad behavior by playing violent computer games” and instead admire the clever efficiency of allowing them to get practice navigating the complexities of realistic roads. And, in this case, it does seem that they are just extracting photo-realistic screenshots rather than having to produce authentic training data, which is a cool trick.
But the fact that the type of data you feed into a machine learning algorithm affects the type of results you get does keep rearing its head.