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

nytimes.com

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

#71

Post by fallingknife »

ant6n wrote: post #60
hn_throwaway_99 wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

OK, I'll try to tread carefully here, but I think it's really helpful to separate the technical issues from the societal issues. In the Google photo case, I've seen the picture in question, and it's not difficult an all to see how a rudimentary statistical algorithm would mistake the photo for a gorilla. No, no human would make this mistake, but due to the lighting in the photo and the woman's hair it's really not ha…

The problem is the training set, which apparently skews too much towards white ppl, and doesn't include checks for the primates/non-white humans differentiation. One could argue this is due to white people building things for white ppl, which does indeed point towards systemic racism in the overall development process.

But the problem is that there isn't any primates/non-white humans differentiation because humans are primates. I doubt anybody smart enough to be an AI engineer of any race would care if they were called a primate, because they are.

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

#72

Post by wizzwizz4 »

toxik wrote: post #59
wizzwizz4 wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's probably because humans are primates – but the AI systems often have to treat “human” as a completely separate category as “primate”, so they have to draw weird, complex boundaries around “primate” (actually “all non-human primates”). When the “primate” classification is stronger than the “human” classification, the system says “primate” rather than “human”, and if it's predominantly been trained on “pictures of…

These models typically don’t have hierarchical labels like that, and they apply a softmax to their output - which means /one/ label will be considered correct. (A softmax means taking the exp of your predicted scores, then divide by the sum.)

I know – but there's no technical reason they shouldn't have more complex relationships between labels (assuming you can train that, which I don't know). If we can't get better training data, at least trying to fix the problem at the algorithms (instead of slapping crude filters on the end of them) would be nice.

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

#73

Post by fallingknife »

Veen wrote: post #70
fallingknife wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 m…

The offense would be entirely based on the fact that I know you know the correct label, and there is emotional processing behind your word choice, neither of which is true in the case of AI.

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

#74

Post by xwdv »

amanaplanacanal wrote: post #53
tgv wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 the…

Yeah, white primates are pretty weird. It only happened because a few migrated north into temperate Europe and Asia and lost their melanin a while ago.

They didn’t lose it. Lighter tones were more popular with potential mates and resulted in gradual whitening over time.

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

#75

Post by kroltan »

hn_throwaway_99 wrote: post #55
dontreact wrote: post #26

Surprised they weren't more careful with this after Google had the same problem a few years ago. https://www.theverge.com/2018/1/12/16882408/google-racist-go...

OK, I'll try to tread carefully here, but I think it's really helpful to separate the technical issues from the societal issues. In the Google photo case, I've seen the picture in question, and it's not difficult an all to see how a rudimentary statistical algorithm would mistake the photo for a gorilla. No, no human would make this mistake, but due to the lighting in the photo and the woman's hair it's really not ha…

Google's street directions also fail miserably with international road names.

Words are fine, but person names or abbreviations will often use the English pronunciation which can be inexact or even incomprehensible.

For example: In Brazil, the major roadways are named with the initial code of the state, or BR if it's a federal road, and a bunch of numbers. So BR-101, for example. These are never named in full, so someone reading "BR-101" would not say "Brasil 101", they would say "B R 101".

There is a state called Santa Catarina, with initials SC, but Google decides that we somehow get transported to the United States somehow, since it reads "SC-406" as "South Carolina 406".

A human would at the very least have the context that SC definitely is not a common abbreviation for South Carolina in Brazil, even if they did not know any state names.

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

#76

Post by hn_throwaway_99 »

fallingknife wrote: post #71
ant6n wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem is the training set, which apparently skews too much towards white ppl, and doesn't include checks for the primates/non-white humans differentiation. One could argue this is due to white people building things for white ppl, which does indeed point towards systemic racism in the overall development process.

But the problem is that there isn't any primates/non-white humans differentiation because humans are primates. I doubt anybody smart enough to be an AI engineer of any race would care if they were called a primate, because they are.

I feel like this is a very "engineer" response that completely ignores how society in general would view this.

Yes, humans are primates. But this wasn't a discussion about taxonomy in biology class. There are lots of cases where primates is used in everyday language where it is clearly intended to refer solely to monkeys and apes. When I go to the "primate house" at the zoo I'm not going to expect to see naked humans behind the glass.

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

#78

Post by wizzwizz4 »

amanaplanacanal wrote: post #53
tgv wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 the…

Yeah, white primates are pretty weird. It only happened because a few migrated north into temperate Europe and Asia and lost their melanin a while ago.

This might be true of great apes, but of primates in general, no. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Macaque and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capuchin_monkey, for instance.

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

#80

Post by fallingknife »

hn_throwaway_99 wrote: post #76
fallingknife wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But the problem is that there isn't any primates/non-white humans differentiation because humans are primates. I doubt anybody smart enough to be an AI engineer of any race would care if they were called a primate, because they are.

I feel like this is a very "engineer" response that completely ignores how society in general would view this. Yes, humans are primates. But this wasn't a discussion about taxonomy in biology class. There are lots of cases where primates is used in everyday language where it is clearly intended to refer solely to monkeys and apes. When I go to the "primate house" at the zoo I'm not going to expect to see naked humans…

But an AI image recognition system is a very "engineer" kind of thing.
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