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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

#141
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.

What I really have to wonder about specifically this instance of political correctness was, how many people were honestly and truly offended by the term 'blacklist' or 'whitelist' before some lignustics, sociology, whatever professer sat down and figured out it should be offensive and told people to be offended?

I feel like this about many attempts to make language politically correct, but I really do wonder, was there actually anyone out there sitting there being offended by this usage of those words before someone told them they should be?

Like was there actually someone sitting there, using an app, seen the term blacklist and immediately started thinking it was an insult to them?

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

#142
I know I've got an audio plugin (AU/VST) called Bit Shift Gain, because it applies the exact gain changes required to just bit-shift the exponent of the floating point value one bit without touching the mantissa. It's a handy plugin for clean gain changes (completely reversible without loss so long as you're gain boosting, not clipping, and then cutting again).

I can't say its name on youtube on my own channel, 'cos YouTube thinks I'm saying something else. (not sure what would happen if I kept on doing it. Maybe they would start sending me apprentice Nazi traffic :D )

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

#143

Incidentally, if you like chess the channel is outstanding. (And back online now.) https://www.youtube.com/user/AGADMATOR I enjoy watching on my lunch breaks. Great breakdowns of games between top players past and present.

Agadmator is a mediocre player (as in no titled) and his analysis are pretty simplistic but he has created a good community of kids around his channel and he is a nice fellow.

For actual analysis of quality you could check out the Chess24 channel where you have guys like Peter Svidler and other GMs analyzing games. The Spanish version is great too, you can find there all the top Spanish speaking players (Dominguez, Vallejo, Anton,Granda, etc)

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

#144
post #67

Isn't the biggest structural problem with ML that it can't explain how it came to a specific conclusion? Anyone knowledgeable on this subject?

Not really. The limitation is mostly in the training set. If you train an ML algo on a set of videos that you either banned or didn't, sure, when you run that in prod all you'll get out of it is "ban or no". But if the training dataset includes a ban reason, then the inferences will include reasons too.

What is opaque is how the algo decided the thing was violating the policy.

That applies to supervised learning. For unsupervised learning, you can still do this by requiring a valid rationale as part of the "win condition".

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

#145
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.

[deleted]

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

#146
post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When they don't incorporate quick banning they get piled on by a mob for letting this or that bad person on their platform. And it's near impossible to monitor all of Youtube just with content moderators.

> piled on by a mob That’s the perception - but usually it’s at most a few hundred busybodies on Twitter, out of Google’s billions of users. People just need to start ignoring these people. They are a tiny minority of people. (It just so happens that seemingly half of them are journalists at the nation’s biggest newspapers.)

I guess that's true but only until the NYT or whoever decides to join in as well.

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

#147

“ 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 mistake…

> When things do reach manual review

I’ve yet to see a case of the hoi poloi get a manual review - you either are a well enough known YouTuber where they have humans dedicated to you, you know someone who works at YouTube and can intercede on your behalf, or you have to whip up a Twitter mob big enough that it hurts YouTube's image or stirs up people with contacts at YouTube.

Even then, sometimes that doesn’t work - look at the Terraria dev.

YouTube effectively has no manual review for 99.9% of people which is why its automated systems accuracy is so important.

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

#148

“ 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 mistake…

People forget that they get these free services for free, and a big portion of that is because ML tools are able to cheaply do a really hard job of moderating. You hear about things like this because they're so unusual, which is a testament to the amount of time they work correctly without being noticed.

Granted, there have been some issues with people getting banned from Google services for what appear to be wrong reasons and then not being able to get any kind of a human response. Those aren't great, but if you ask people whether they want to pay $10/month for YouTube so human moderators can stop this from happening or get it for free and have the .0001% chance that they get banned purely by accident, they'll take the latter. And that's putting aside the fact that there will still be errors with humans doing it, and there will still need to be the same appeal process to resolve those.

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

#149
post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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."

Because the inner bias that humans have that might lead to similar exclusion is implicitly hidden and somehow excused and the machines are held to a higher standard, for some reason.

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

#150
post #50
post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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.

In the last couple years especially I feel like I am walking on eggshells when talking to people. Especially when talking to people I don't know as well. It feels so easy to offend someone these days and I'm getting sick of it.

I've been having to unfollow a ton of podcasts recently because no matter how far from being related to politics some podcasts are, they just love to make sure a chunk of the episode is devoted to calling white people privileged and talking about different groups burdens. I was listening to a podcast episode talking about Skyways in a city and somehow half the podcast ended up being about how the skyways affected certain racial groups. It's a podcast that is supposed to be focused on the cool architectural features and infrastructure of cities. Somehow it ends up being a political podcast about racial inequality.

Sometimes I just want to be able to relax, but I feel like wherever I go whether it be TV, Movies, Podcasts, or even the news, I feel like I am being attacked wherever I go and that I have to be afraid of offending someone with what I say.

Even just making this comment I'm afraid it's going to be downvoted because of mentioning races in a somewhat negative sounding way.

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