Don't these kinds of companies have a basic checklist before releasing features like this? And if so, why doesn't this checklist include things like "doesn't identify members of racial group as animals" ? It makes me think that any woke PR coming from Facebook is lip service, if they don't have even basic checks in place.
Facebook Apologizes After A.I. Puts “Primates” Label on Video of Black Men
11–20 of 173 posts
Re: Facebook Apologizes After A.I. Puts “Primates” Label on Video of Black Men
#12Aren't we all primates?
[deleted]
Re: Facebook Apologizes After A.I. Puts “Primates” Label on Video of Black Men
#13Don't these kinds of companies have a basic checklist before releasing features like this? And if so, why doesn't this checklist include things like "doesn't identify members of racial group as animals" ? It makes me think that any woke PR coming from Facebook is lip service, if they don't have even basic checks in place.
The space for potential edge cases are so large it will be wack mole.
Inference tasks isn’t like software testing where the states are well defined.
Re: Facebook Apologizes After A.I. Puts “Primates” Label on Video of Black Men
#14Aren't we all primates?
There's a history of emphasizing a closer relationship of some racial groups to the rest of the animal kingdom as a way of othering them or implying their nature/capabilities are more animal-like and less human-like.
So while it's technically true all humans are primates, the selective emphasis and its connotations is an issue.
(Weirdly, there's some substantial overlap between people who take offense at the idea they're related to other primates and feel a little freer to emphasize the relationship of a human out-group to other primates, which possibly illuminates something about the problems.)
Re: Facebook Apologizes After A.I. Puts “Primates” Label on Video of Black Men
#15Not really wanting to delve into the touchy issue of this particular ai fuckup, but it got me thinking about the issue of using ai to compartmentalize and categorize things in general.
This is a very obvious example of how bad it can be. Regular complaints from people about ai recommendation engines and most other similar ai driven tagging systems exist.
What i wonder though is on a more subtle level, how these ai categorizers are quietly altering our perceptions of things and the world?
We notice when it's something obvious like the story in the OP, but how many quiet little mistakes do we just ignore or not notice that on a subconcious level are changing the way we think about or classify things.
More and more it seems like society and all things are being neatly placed in little boxes, where they're filed, stamped, indexed, and numbered by fancy algorithms operating without much human oversight, until something like this happens.
How much of this is subconciously affecting human perception of the world?
Re: Facebook Apologizes After A.I. Puts “Primates” Label on Video of Black Men
#16Aren't we all primates?
I applaud you to join Facebook PR team. You might be the cure the internet needs where we gain the critical momentum for antitrust action.
Re: Facebook Apologizes After A.I. Puts “Primates” Label on Video of Black Men
#17Earlier quoted context omitted.
There’s a time and a place for being pedantic, this isn’t it.
Exactly, we should keep feeding the outrage machine.
What "outrage machine?" I don't see anyone being outraged. The article doesn't project or describe any outrage, no one in this thread seems to be outraged. (yet.)
Re: Facebook Apologizes After A.I. Puts “Primates” Label on Video of Black Men
#18Don't these kinds of companies have a basic checklist before releasing features like this? And if so, why doesn't this checklist include things like "doesn't identify members of racial group as animals" ? It makes me think that any woke PR coming from Facebook is lip service, if they don't have even basic checks in place.
Regardless of whether they do, the tech that underlies modern image classification approaches (i.e. deep neural networks) is pathologically hard to understand to the point where it's practically impossible to provide the guarantees you're describing. For example, adding noise to a picture of a panda can make a network think it's a gibbon: https://towardsdatascience.com/breaking-neural-networks-with...
That's not to say, of course, that there's nothing to be done. People who aren't white have historically been laughably underrepresented in computer vision datasets, and while that's been changing, I gather that representation still isn't where it needs to be.
Re: Facebook Apologizes After A.I. Puts “Primates” Label on Video of Black Men
#19Don't these kinds of companies have a basic checklist before releasing features like this? And if so, why doesn't this checklist include things like "doesn't identify members of racial group as animals" ? It makes me think that any woke PR coming from Facebook is lip service, if they don't have even basic checks in place.
> It makes me think that any woke PR coming from Facebook is lip service
Corporate PR about anything that isn't concrete things which misleading statements would be both easily revealed and have adverse (e.g., securities-laws-related) consequences is almost 100% lip service, so, yeah, that's a safe assumption, anyway.
Re: Facebook Apologizes After A.I. Puts “Primates” Label on Video of Black Men
#20Don't these kinds of companies have a basic checklist before releasing features like this? And if so, why doesn't this checklist include things like "doesn't identify members of racial group as animals" ? It makes me think that any woke PR coming from Facebook is lip service, if they don't have even basic checks in place.
The space for potential edge cases are so large it will be wack mole. Inference tasks isn’t like software testing where the states are well defined.
A large and complex task is well suited for the talented people behind Facebook. But even a list of basic searches that exercised the engine would have caught this. No excuses imo, particularly since it happened to Google[0] not that long ago. Was nobody paying attention?
0. https://www.theverge.com/2018/1/12/16882408/google-racist-go...