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

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

#121

Post by suifbwish » Sat, Sep 04, 2021, 7:19 PM UTC

jrm4 wrote: post #100

Black person here. So, the lack of outrage here (I mean in hacker news) is unsurprising, and would of course be greater if there were more black people "in tech" and by extension here. And even as I write this, I'm not trying to judge -- just more open the door to understanding, like, y'all understand this fact, right? I find myself searching for metaphorical equivalents. I'm thinking something like "what if it label…

I also happen to be black but that actually has very little bearing on what I have to say and am merely mentioning it to prevent anyone from suggesting that my opinion on the matter is related to my skin color.

The problem with this is no one actually trained the AI to have a racially bias but rather did not train it on recognizing the difference. Why? Probably because no one knew the computer was going to identify this resemblance and immediately label it as such (I have heard babies learning to talk and name shapes/colors do the exact same thing with no outside influence) Computer vision operates on matrices of color coordinates that share resemblances with other similar matrices and attempts to match patterns between multiple sets to establish resemblance. It is not the fault of the computer or the programmer that there are coincidental resemblances that exceed it’s learned threshold where it decides that the two sets represents objects of the same type.

I personally am ok with admitting that my skin color visually is more similar to images of certain non human primates and can understand why this problem is not a programmer bias but actually a complicated computer vision problem as it’s easy to spot the resemblance but often difficult to train a neural net on why the images resemble eachother but are not related.

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

#122

Post by skinkestek » Sat, Sep 04, 2021, 7:54 PM UTC

jrm4 wrote: post #100

Black person here. So, the lack of outrage here (I mean in hacker news) is unsurprising, and would of course be greater if there were more black people "in tech" and by extension here. And even as I write this, I'm not trying to judge -- just more open the door to understanding, like, y'all understand this fact, right? I find myself searching for metaphorical equivalents. I'm thinking something like "what if it label…

White person here:

At this point, if a web scale service like this do this it should be grounds for significant sanctions: increasing fines (think GDPR scale) and closer scrutiny (think mandatory inspections and quality controls every month, paid for by the company) should do I think.

But, while I'm really annoyed by this and support you I'm also sure there will be enough outrage against it in time from.

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

#123

Post by Tagbert » Sat, Sep 04, 2021, 7:54 PM UTC

Y_Y wrote: post #97

Tagbert wrote: post #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 be…

I've dealt with a lot of badly labelled datasets, but I can't say I ever saw one maliciously labelled by racists. There are other more subtle problems that may contribute. As an amateur photographer I've been told that most cameras are calibrated for light skin. If you aren't careful with your setup you'll get bad definition in shadows and relatively very dark areas. If you have badly calibrated/exposed photos then v…

That was my point. If the training data contained mostly white faces and few black faces, the AI would have fewer cases to base it’s weightings when trying to analyze a photo with black faces.

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

#124

Post by jpambrun » Sat, Sep 04, 2021, 7:55 PM UTC

hodgesrm wrote: post #109

jrm4 wrote: post #100

Black person here. So, the lack of outrage here (I mean in hacker news) is unsurprising, and would of course be greater if there were more black people "in tech" and by extension here. And even as I write this, I'm not trying to judge -- just more open the door to understanding, like, y'all understand this fact, right? I find myself searching for metaphorical equivalents. I'm thinking something like "what if it label…

Glad you posted. A lot of AI code simply cannot be trusted. In particularly, it's pretty obvious that the teams using it either don't do a lot of QA or don't understand how to test their systems in the first place. I find it mind-boggling that this technology is so widely used with such limited understanding. The interesting question is how the hell do we fix this?

One example doesn't support your claim that QA was not sufficient. You will always get misclassifications, most won't be offensive to anyone. This is not a medical device or a self driving car, this is Facebook trying to squeeze more engagement..

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

#125

Post by jrm4 » Sat, Sep 04, 2021, 11:30 PM UTC

suifbwish wrote: post #121

jrm4 wrote: post #100

Black person here. So, the lack of outrage here (I mean in hacker news) is unsurprising, and would of course be greater if there were more black people "in tech" and by extension here. And even as I write this, I'm not trying to judge -- just more open the door to understanding, like, y'all understand this fact, right? I find myself searching for metaphorical equivalents. I'm thinking something like "what if it label…

I also happen to be black but that actually has very little bearing on what I have to say and am merely mentioning it to prevent anyone from suggesting that my opinion on the matter is related to my skin color. The problem with this is no one actually trained the AI to have a racially bias but rather did not train it on recognizing the difference. Why? Probably because no one knew the computer was going to identify t…

That first sentence, man. Like, I feel bad second guessing people, in some ways it's not my right -- but it so feels like the kind of "respectability" talk I used to say out of what I thought was "the truth," but now realize it was a sort of habitual way to defuse the room.

So I will state clearly -- yes, I am aware my opinions are absolutely related to my skin color and that's precisely why you all need to pay special attention to them. Not because of some sort of silly inherent genetic thing, but because I have experiences that many of you don't.

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

#126

Post by pc86 » Sat, Sep 04, 2021, 11:38 PM UTC

skinkestek wrote: post #122

jrm4 wrote: post #100

Black person here. So, the lack of outrage here (I mean in hacker news) is unsurprising, and would of course be greater if there were more black people "in tech" and by extension here. And even as I write this, I'm not trying to judge -- just more open the door to understanding, like, y'all understand this fact, right? I find myself searching for metaphorical equivalents. I'm thinking something like "what if it label…

White person here: At this point, if a web scale service like this do this it should be grounds for significant sanctions: increasing fines (think GDPR scale) and closer scrutiny (think mandatory inspections and quality controls every month, paid for by the company) should do I think. But, while I'm really annoyed by this and support you I'm also sure there will be enough outrage against it in time from.

Fined for what, exactly? They deployed a flawed AI model. The flaw was pointed out, and they removed the model and apologized.

I'm genuinely curious what else should have happened.

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

#127

Post by nzeribe » Sat, Sep 04, 2021, 11:40 PM UTC

At this point, it's obvious this is deliberate.

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

#128

Post by nzeribe » Sat, Sep 04, 2021, 11:44 PM UTC

suifbwish wrote: post #121

jrm4 wrote: post #100

Black person here. So, the lack of outrage here (I mean in hacker news) is unsurprising, and would of course be greater if there were more black people "in tech" and by extension here. And even as I write this, I'm not trying to judge -- just more open the door to understanding, like, y'all understand this fact, right? I find myself searching for metaphorical equivalents. I'm thinking something like "what if it label…

I also happen to be black but that actually has very little bearing on what I have to say and am merely mentioning it to prevent anyone from suggesting that my opinion on the matter is related to my skin color. The problem with this is no one actually trained the AI to have a racially bias but rather did not train it on recognizing the difference. Why? Probably because no one knew the computer was going to identify t…

I find it baffling and dispiriting that you, as a Black person, believe this is more likely to be an "error" than an act of deliberate racism. It's getting silly, now. A white racist programmer has done this on purpose because he finds it hilarious. The chances of a computer equating monkey and man, given the correct datasets, are close to nil. There's a blindness - a wilful ignorance - to look away and show good faith. Why is that?

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

#129

Post by nzeribe » Sat, Sep 04, 2021, 11:48 PM UTC

Y_Y wrote: post #97

Tagbert wrote: post #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 be…

I've dealt with a lot of badly labelled datasets, but I can't say I ever saw one maliciously labelled by racists. There are other more subtle problems that may contribute. As an amateur photographer I've been told that most cameras are calibrated for light skin. If you aren't careful with your setup you'll get bad definition in shadows and relatively very dark areas. If you have badly calibrated/exposed photos then v…

I'm sorry but no. I don't believe this at all. What are the chances of say, you finding a dataset maliciously labelled by racists and how would you uncover that? Would you ask every software engineer how he felt about Black Lives Matter as he tagged images? It's more likely that there is malicious intent in a company where 2% of software engineers are African-American than not.

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

#130

Post by ksaj » Sun, Sep 05, 2021, 12:11 AM UTC

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...

For Asians, there is a history of cameras saying "Someone Blinked!" I think it is, or at least should be, part of the conversation. My partner is Asian, and we had a camera with this problem. We thought it was funny, but it demonstrates weaknesses in computer image processing vs. human visual processing that probably has nothing to do with racism.