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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

#81

Post by delecti »

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…

Separating technical issues from social ones is the source of the problem. I don't think it'll be the source of the solution.

One of the big issues with relying on AI is training data, and the responsibility for an inadequately trained AI model falls on the people who judged it ready for use, but that doesn't mean the outcome of the AI isn't racist. An AI doesn't need to know the sociopolitical history of race to be doing racist things.

Also, I've never heard of a location with Roman numerals in the name. I agree that programming in the context of knowing who Malcolm X is into a map program might be asking a bit much, but I think an "easier" implementation (reading them as letters) would have also done the right thing.

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

#82

Post by ant6n »

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 was gonna write "monkey-blackppl-differentiation", but decided it was too offensive and aimed for more neutral language, thinking for anybody who doesn't want to be an asshole it's clear what it's about.

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

#83

Post by wizzwizz4 »

xwdv wrote: post #74
amanaplanacanal wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Runaway sexual selection effects generally don't result in beneficial traits; reduced melanin is beneficial in less sunny climates, because cholecalciferol (so-called “Vitamin D₃”, even though it's not a vitamin) synthesis requires sun exposure.

And yes, having less of something is correctly called “losing” it in the English language. That was not a correction.

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

#84

Post by ekabod »

6gvONxR4sf7o wrote: post #58

There’s an amazing number of “but people are primates” comments. Correctness here includes specificity. If person and primate are both candidates, then primate isn’t a correct answer to what this is trying to do. You wouldn’t react to the phrase ‘treating women as objects’ by saying people are objects, right?

people are primates is proven whereas women are objects is unproven. So your analogy doesn't work.

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

#85

Post by drdeca »

ekabod wrote: post #84
6gvONxR4sf7o wrote: post #58

There’s an amazing number of “but people are primates” comments. Correctness here includes specificity. If person and primate are both candidates, then primate isn’t a correct answer to what this is trying to do. You wouldn’t react to the phrase ‘treating women as objects’ by saying people are objects, right?

people are primates is proven whereas women are objects is unproven. So your analogy doesn't work.

Huh? What do you mean?

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

#86

Post by adventured »

fallingknife wrote: post #80
hn_throwaway_99 wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

And in cases where that engineer thing is used on people - it matters when you label a black person as a primate on a live social media network, since it's understood that would be likely to cause significant offense.

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

#87

Post by amelius »

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...

> Surprised they weren't more careful with this

They were careful, otherwise they wouldn't have labeled it "primates", but e.g. "monkeys" instead.

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

#88

Post by ceejayoz »

chuckee wrote: post #6

> The video, dated June 27, 2020, was by The Daily Mail and featured clips of Black men in altercations with white civilians and police officers. It had no connection to monkeys or primates. Huh. All the other incidents the NY Times article mentions come with links, but this one (that the article is ostensibly about) doesn't. Odd.

> The Daily Mail and featured clips of Black men in altercations with white civilians and police officers. It had no connection to monkeys or primates.

I'm guessing it ingested the Daily Mail's comment sections.

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

#90

Post by jonplackett »

Clampower wrote: post #9
jonplackett wrote: post #7

Earlier 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.

Taking something seriously is what I’m suggesting, not being outraged. Being flippant or intentionally over pedantic is dismissing it as unimportant or a non-issue.

It would be easy as a white person (as I am) to look at this and say, ah well it’s just an honest mistake. But this is just an example of a wider problem of AIs being trained on white people.

A while back I made the first automatic face swap app Face Juggler and I would often get complaints that it didn’t work as well on black people - I was using apple’s face detection so couldn’t do anything about it which was frustrating.

It might seem trivial but it isn’t. AI’s are going to be running more and more stuff that is a lot more important.

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