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YouTube blocked chess channel after mistaken detection of racial slurs

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Re: YouTube blocked chess channel after mistaken detection of racial slurs

#121

“ The researchers now suggest that social-media platforms should incorporate chess language in their algorithms to avoid future incidents like this.” Or maybe don’t automate banning YouTube channels via nebulous black boxes? Or can advertisers stop being afraid of anything and everything?

Setting this case aside because it's sloppy reporting based on what another classifier found, this is a hard problem. Youtube gets too many videos and comments for humans to manually review them. Flagging helps, and Google likely uses ML more complex than just text and classifier (who is commenting, is the post trending, patterns in comments, etc.) When things do reach manual review, remember that humans make mistakes, possibly more often than ML, this could be human error.

You actually want the algorithm to be a black box so that people don't know that you can trick it by only commenting between 5pm and 8pm on an IP in the Netherlands from Chrome, and avoid using words like "cactus."

The important part here is a transparent appeal process, not that ML is only pretty good at these problems.

Re: YouTube blocked chess channel after mistaken detection of racial slurs

#122
post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your comment has been moderated for racist language ("black boxes").

You kid but i've received 2 pull-requests on my open-source project, which only goal was to replace "Blacklist" with "Blocklist" in the app preferences. I don't receive many PRs. This is a real trend.

Following the example of trend-setting hip SV companies like Twitter ( https://www.indiatoday.in/technology/news/story/twitter-drop...) our BigCo has recently issued a policy, and those terms have been quicky replaced everywhere accordingly. It isn't a trend, it is already happened reality.

Re: YouTube blocked chess channel after mistaken detection of racial slurs

#123
post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your comment has been moderated for racist language ("black boxes").

You kid but i've received 2 pull-requests on my open-source project, which only goal was to replace "Blacklist" with "Blocklist" in the app preferences. I don't receive many PRs. This is a real trend.

The English dramatist Philip Massinger used the phrase "black list" in his 1639 tragedy The Unnatural Combat.

Re: YouTube blocked chess channel after mistaken detection of racial slurs

#124

Amadgator is a one of the top chess youtubers, after carlson and hikaru. They should have a human-check placed by channel size - if for nothing else just to not get bad PR like this.

Gotta include Gotham in that mix (personally I'd rate Gotham over Amadgator).

I personally like Eric Rosen, because he's got that calm and relaxing Bob Ross energy.

Re: YouTube blocked chess channel after mistaken detection of racial slurs

#125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

See if any of them have attainted a Masters degree ;)

That's my favorite example of how silly it is! Lets give all the people with a master degree a change to "main degree". "main of arts", "main of engineering", "main of science" lol

I suppose you could replace "master" with "graduate"

Re: YouTube blocked chess channel after mistaken detection of racial slurs

#126
post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Bear in mind what we have here is an example of the cutting edge of AI in its real world use. It doesn't exactly inspire faith in AI if some of the best is this thick when it comes to making decisions that would be incredibly basic for a human of even below average intelligence.

Frankly the whole thing stinks. On the whim of an unaccountable AI basically anything can happen. We need laws around this sooner rather than later. AIs are getting more powerful but less responsible. Just don't have an argument about a book or you could end up on death row. Gordon Dickson wrote a short story about this https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computers_Don%27t_Argue

Why do we need laws around this? We need to hold the people accountable that put this into production and/or produced it. People should be able to build bad AI, but if that causes poor real world outcomes, then the people that okay'd its use need to take responsibility.

"An AI erroneously banned the channel," shouldn't get any more leeway than "A support staff member banned the channel."

Re: YouTube blocked chess channel after mistaken detection of racial slurs

#127
post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Black list and its opposite, white list, associate black with bad and white with good. The usage of black in “black box” means opaque, not bad. So these aren’t the same. I had never thought about the connotations of blacklist and whitelist before it was pointed out to me. In retrospect, blacklist and whitelist are unnatural meanings of the words black and white, and blocklist and allowlist make much more sense. Conse…

I haven't read heavily into this debate so this comes from a position of ignorance of the arguments. Feel free to link me to a reference if this has been analyzed along these lines already, I would like to learn. The convention seem to me to follow several similar motifs from the sciences. Black holes do not allow matter to escape and white holes are theoretical constructs that admit matter to the universe. The color…

It seems we are using black for bad and white for good in English, which is strange since we had never used them before. Also, I feel like blocking and allowing makes sense when it comes to language, because bad and white mean the same. But when it comes to code, which the rest of the world uses black to mean bad and white to mean good, I don't know if that makes sense.

Re: YouTube blocked chess channel after mistaken detection of racial slurs

#128
post #3

Not sure what a thinly resourced piece like this is doing so high up on HN. There’s really very little evidence that this has anything to do with racial slurs. From a quick read: last June, the channel was banned for “harmful and dangerous” content. The ban was removed in under 24 hours. YouTube has not confirmed the reason. And yet: > Experts suspect that it was the usage of words like "black" and "white" that confu…

> Not sure what a thinly resourced piece like this is doing so high up on HN.

Honestly, and anecdotally, I think there's been a large influx of people recently on the right wing spectrum and/or the more outrage driven spectrum. I've noticed a considerable shift in the number of outraged comments and right wing view points in the last few months.

I believe this ties in to the deplatforming of Parler. I can only surmise that it either led to a lot of lurkers becoming more active, or an influx of new members joining to share their outrage and sticking around. Or maybe it did shift existing members over to being more sensitive about what they perceive as internet policing.

Re: YouTube blocked chess channel after mistaken detection of racial slurs

#129

“ The researchers now suggest that social-media platforms should incorporate chess language in their algorithms to avoid future incidents like this.” Or maybe don’t automate banning YouTube channels via nebulous black boxes? Or can advertisers stop being afraid of anything and everything?

There are way too many videos for manual review and the relatively rare false positive (one high profile case every few months vs how many videos uploaded every day?) is worth the gain in efficiency. But there should certainly be a better manual review process once the AI messes up.

Perhaps this is true - it's quite plausible that there are too many videos uploaded to YouTube for any manual review to scale in a cost-efficient manner.

However to me this does not negate YouTube's good-faith responsibility to clarify what kind of product they are and what they intend to do with their service as the years go by. These mistakes are extremely costly and potentially offensive to the end user, no matter how rare they may be in daily practice.

YouTube made very foolhardy decisions to encourage the ingestion of any and all video content from just about all kinds of people. This had the impact of normalizing video content production practices, giving AI-directed content moderation a false sense of success in its early days of deployment. As content has grown more complex and nuanced on these platforms, the AI systems deployed have miserably failed to accommodate these changes in the ecosystem. It's all in an (IMO) futile effort for YouTube to make good on their reckless company roadmap without specific people having to take personal responsibility for their blunder.

Re: YouTube blocked chess channel after mistaken detection of racial slurs

#130
post #107
post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A lot of language-fixing slacktivism easily becomes a trend because it's highly visible and requires no genuine effort. It's complete bullshit, though. This particular bullshit is awful since it trivializes all this historic pain to some inane game of word association. There's no point arguing, though, just drag your heels until they get bored and go off on some other crusade.

I think you're right, there are far too many people trying to do good and being led astray by the self-righteousness of a few. Not in the sense of being brainwashed or being influenced by some external force - like the religious right - but simply by the fact that they can't see through the nonsense the rest of us are talking about.

> Not in the sense of being brainwashed or being influenced by some external force - like the religious right

Oh I don’t know about that. The “religious left” of today looks, acts, and smells a lot like the religious right of the ‘80’s to me. It’s the same instinct that’s being leveraged in people, just righteousness wrapped in a polka-dot cloth rather than a plaid one. Institutions clearly promote “right-thinking” whether it’s banning the use of words, doing mandatory internal critical race theory sessions, coordinated deplatforming, and let’s not even get started on the soft sciences in schooling and the state of what’s called “news”. The other day I skimmed a headline about a librarian burning their copies of books by Trump and Rush Limbaugh. In some ways the sheer weight of secular institutional support for today’s self-righteousness makes the American church of the eighties look like amateur hour.

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