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

nytimes.com

61–70 of 173 posts

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

#61

"Primates" is an entirely correct label for any video depicting humans. If you find a picture of my white face anywhere, feel free to put a "primate" caption under it.

"Animals" apply too. Also quite a few others.

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

#63
post #57

This particular AI failure mode keeps surfacing, but seems to be fixed rapidly when it generates bad press. How do they actually correct it? Teach it some more granular categories of living things? Slap a sensitivity filter on top of its output?

AFAIK Google just blocked all “gorilla, primate” related tags in Google Photos.

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

#64
post #57

This particular AI failure mode keeps surfacing, but seems to be fixed rapidly when it generates bad press. How do they actually correct it? Teach it some more granular categories of living things? Slap a sensitivity filter on top of its output?

Increase the training set to include more non-white ppl and animals?

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

#67
The people here saying the label is "correct" are both wrong, and missing the point. The objective of the model is not "taxonomic classification", the objective is "video recommendation". The label, in the context of the purpose of the model, is completely wrong.

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

#68
“Aren't people primates?”

Words have meaning on multiple levels.

On a technical level, yes, all humans are primates, but if the algorithm were following this rule, it would tag all humans in all photos as primates, but it didn’t do that. It only tagged black people.

That takes us to a social meaning level. In this context, you have to consider the long, racists history of dehumanizing black people. They have often been called “monkey” and “ape” with the intent to degrade and to segregate them from “people”.

In that light, and the fact that the label was not applied in all cases where appropriate, it is hard to see it as anything but racist. Probably not deliberately but if the training material contained racist material, it could bias the result. Even if the training material was inadvertently unbalanced and contained very few black faces, the algorithm would have less experience with black faces and would not know how to categorize them as well as white faces.

This is analogous to people who grow up and live largely isolated from close associates with those of other races. Their experiences are filled with varied samples of interactions with people of their own race, but are poor in samples with other races. In the case where we have less experience, we tend to fall back on broad stereotypes and our reactions show strong racial bias.

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

#69
Why not just ask the AI what she meant?

LIME - Local Interpretable Model-Agnostic Explanations comes to mind.

As far as I do understand the classification was the tagging 'primate' on a video of people with different color of skin and different facial features.

The interpretation, that our Lady AI meant harm to the people with dark skin color with tagging them as primates is a loading of the viewer.

By the way,´a great new opportunity for cyber lawyers and machine inquisitors.

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

#70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This. The entire point of the article is to highlight what was an unexpected, unanticipated, and most unfortunate AI error. This is a learning experience, pun intended.

But it isn't an error. Humans are primates.

It is not incorrect by a dictionary definition, but there are other ways of being incorrect. If I identified you at a party by saying "fallingknife is the ape sitting on the sofa" you would probably interpret it differently than if I had said "fallingknife is the person sitting on the sofa". Both are correct, but most people wouldn't interpret them as equally polite or friendly.

Members of the set "person" are also members of the superset "ape", but that's irrelevant because the connotations are different, and it's the connotations that are annoying people.

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