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Facebook Apologizes After A.I. Puts “Primates” Label on Video of Black Men

nytimes.com

21–30 of 173 posts

Re: Facebook Apologizes After A.I. Puts “Primates” Label on Video of Black Men

#21
post #11

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.

Did they have even one black person on the AI team?

https://www.credera.com/insights/racial-bias-in-machine-lear...

Re: Facebook Apologizes After A.I. Puts “Primates” Label on Video of Black Men

#22
post #11

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.

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.

Another way to put this is: nobody working in this field has control over what they are building, and can't make any promises about how it will behave.

It's like launching a rocket ship that you can't test in a physical simulation first. Something is going to go wrong that can't be predicted because we lack the understanding, but this is seen as an acceptable risk.

Re: Facebook Apologizes After A.I. Puts “Primates” Label on Video of Black Men

#23

Aren't we all primates?

Most primates are not intelligent enough to admit this to themselves. They see themselves as something categorically different.

Which, by the way, is related to the discussed problem.

The embarrassing thing about these phenomena is that a machine holds up a mirror to us. Naked and ugly.

To 'patch' the mirror won't change a thing. Especially when he is right under the right circumstances. In the right context.

Re: Facebook Apologizes After A.I. Puts “Primates” Label on Video of Black Men

#24
post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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...

Maybe they thought it would be racist if they explicitly devised rules preventing black people being identified as primates.

Re: Facebook Apologizes After A.I. Puts “Primates” Label on Video of Black Men

#27
post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, we are, and the author of the NYT article seems weirdly unaware of that. However, the issue here, I’m sure, is that Facebook’s algorithms don’t classify videos of white humans as involving “primates” as well.

We don’t really know that. It’s possible at some point the AI may have been classifying white humans as primates but nobody cares because it’s white humans. You only have a story worth reading when it’s against an underprivileged minority.

It's unlikely. Search for images of primate, and you'll see fairly dark, humanoid shapes. Poor training data then seems like a more probable reason for visual confusion.

> You only have a story worth reading when it’s against an underprivileged minority.

To some extent. But I think there would also be a story if some medicine would work badly on white people, or men. The problem here is that these labels would be there for everyone to see and comment on.

If facebook would live by their own rules, they would ban the AI team from using fb accounts.

Re: Facebook Apologizes After A.I. Puts “Primates” Label on Video of Black Men

#28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Another way to put this is: nobody working in this field has control over what they are building, and can't make any promises about how it will behave. It's like launching a rocket ship that you can't test in a physical simulation first. Something is going to go wrong that can't be predicted because we lack the understanding, but this is seen as an acceptable risk.

Which is inherent to the problem. The domain is the space of _all possible natural images_, it’s so big, it’s ridiculous. Fundamentally, these techniques do not analyze images like humans do, but are rather trained to pick out any salient signal it can latch on to. That seems to be “primates are mostly like humans but darker”, which is superficially true but a pretty weak definition as it includes dark skinned humans.

Re: Facebook Apologizes After A.I. Puts “Primates” Label on Video of Black Men

#29
post #11

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.

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.

Yeah, but it shows some real lack of care to fall into the same edge case that Google was widely criticized for 3 years ago.
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