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

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

#161

Post by pure_simplicity »

shashwatak wrote: post #160
pure_simplicity wrote: post #152

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No need to calm things down or thread needles, since I am rather stoic. You wanted interaction rather than downvotes, I gave you exactly that, so no need to complain about it being exhausting either. The downvotes may have come from individuals who also think it would be helpful if you treated yourself and others as individuals rather than avatars of their racial collective. Your opinions are your opinions, there is…

MLK did not preach “color blindness”, in fact he explicitly warned against the duplicity of “moderate whites” such as yourself.

Conservative black, sorry. You failed the guessing game and proved my point that skin color correlates with opinion about as poorly as maths ability does (i.e. not meaningfully).

MLK preached judging by Character instead of Color, which is referred to as color blindness.

Also, the moderates of his era were moderate relative to the political landscape of their era. This is not a universal indictment, but a very culturally situated and contextually dependent statement, unlike the universal and timeless principle of color blindness.

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

#162

Post by dontreact »

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…

If you know in advance that Primate vs. Human confusions are going to be a potential issue that upset a lot of people (say, because it already happened with a similar system at another company) there are certainly ways of trying to ensure that same confusion doesn't happen.

Ways to actually fix the problem:

1. Probe the decision boundary between these two classes in your training and test sets. I.E. look for the humans closest to being misclassified as primates. You could probably quickly get a sense if you are near/at risk of making this misclassification. You may also possibly find 1 or 2 mislabeled examples that are throwing things off and can be corrected.

2. Boost your training set by labeling more unlabeled images that are near this decision boundary.

So my point was just: this was an issue that could have been anticipated because it has already happened before. It is unfortunate that this issue came up when there are things you can do (such as the steps above), which I believe could have totally squashed this issue with enough iteration.

I can't know for sure that this is not what the Facebook team did. If they did take care to try and avoid this harmful model confusion, then I would be very surprised given my experience with deep learning and computer vision.

At a minimum, it would have been pretty trivial and a low impact to users to remove the primate class if they didn't have the time/bandwidth to really investigate this more thoroughly as I've described.

You can try to argue "hey no one should get upset about this confusion because computer vision is hard and mistakes happen", but I don't think that's a very solid argument either given the long and relatively recent history of racists misclassifying a particular subset of humans as primates.

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

#163

Post by spennant »

pure_simplicity wrote: post #161
shashwatak wrote: post #160

Earlier quoted context omitted.

MLK did not preach “color blindness”, in fact he explicitly warned against the duplicity of “moderate whites” such as yourself.

Conservative black, sorry. You failed the guessing game and proved my point that skin color correlates with opinion about as poorly as maths ability does (i.e. not meaningfully). MLK preached judging by Character instead of Color, which is referred to as color blindness. Also, the moderates of his era were moderate relative to the political landscape of their era. This is not a universal indictment, but a very cultur…

I read jrm4’s comment a little differently… It’s not that one’s skincolor correlates to opinion, but that it necessarily informs it. It’s pretty evident that people of similar skin tone and experiences may differ in opinion (just look at any family). Because of this, my takeaway wasn’t that it was the only thing that informed one’s opinion, but skin, as one of our society’s integral method for categorizing people, is intractable from the opinion forming process, particularly around matters concerning race.

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

#164

Post by shashwatak »

pure_simplicity wrote: post #161
shashwatak wrote: post #160

Earlier quoted context omitted.

MLK did not preach “color blindness”, in fact he explicitly warned against the duplicity of “moderate whites” such as yourself.

Conservative black, sorry. You failed the guessing game and proved my point that skin color correlates with opinion about as poorly as maths ability does (i.e. not meaningfully). MLK preached judging by Character instead of Color, which is referred to as color blindness. Also, the moderates of his era were moderate relative to the political landscape of their era. This is not a universal indictment, but a very cultur…

Color-Blindness is not the same thing as Judging the Content of Character.

Of course, we all deserve to be judged based on the content of our character and not on superficial markers like skin, gender, etc, etc, etc.

However, broadly and statistically speaking, people from different economic and racial groups tend to have differing experiences, largely because of systems and not really because of any individual experience.

This is the core thesis of Critical Theory (and it’s subset Critical Race Theory): in the court of law, one must consider all of the details and context of a person, as they necessarily have an impact on an individual’s experiences.

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

#165

Post by nzeribe »

jpambrun wrote: post #140
nzeribe wrote: post #139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But that's not what happened, is it? The algorithm hasn't miscategorised men, it has miscategorised Black men. I'd argue the AI has done its job, with a high degree of accuracy. It found what the programmers were looking for when they wrote the code. It was meant to be an insult, and was highly effective. Lack of outrage on HN is as expected; the authors are quite possibly in the comments holding their sides with lau…

Those are baseless accusations based on poor understanding of ML. This behaviour is counterproductive. It is not susceptible to sway me towards your point of view, but instead discredit you and those holding similar opinions.

I am not here to "sway" you. Your hand-wavey dismissal is absurd, given the history of race in Silicon Valley. William Shockley was an out-and-out white supremacist. He goes on to form Shockley Semiconductor which begets Fairchild which becomes Intel. He set the culture. It is patently obvious that this outcome is likely written in code, and for you to dismiss this probability is absured. You have not discredited my position in any way, nor even attempted to challenge it. How on earth would you know if my understanding of ML is "poor" or otherwise? The joke in the code was to associate Black Men with monkeys. It is a trope that goes back hundreds of years. The joke is: "Look, even computers think Black men are primates" and that this position is objective, logical.

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

#166

Post by nzeribe »

jrm4 wrote: post #141
nzeribe wrote: post #139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But that's not what happened, is it? The algorithm hasn't miscategorised men, it has miscategorised Black men. I'd argue the AI has done its job, with a high degree of accuracy. It found what the programmers were looking for when they wrote the code. It was meant to be an insult, and was highly effective. Lack of outrage on HN is as expected; the authors are quite possibly in the comments holding their sides with lau…

Actually I now must strongly depart from your argument of intentionality here, and reiterate something I said before. I was about to respond to the person below, but they're more-or-less right. I don't know how intentional any of the programmers were here, so I'm not going to speculate on that. But I will absolutely insist that this racist outcome is possible -- even likely -- absent any bad intentions from the progr…

Why wouldn't you assume intentionality as more likely than not given the disturbing history of race in Silicon Valley? The position you hold out of the gate is unlikely and your assumptions of good-faith are misplaced. William Shockley, who invented the transistor and essentially set up the Valley and it's culture, was an outright white supremacist. You see his legacy in the hiring percentages. The probability is that this was done on purpose. Your position is dangerous, in all honesty, because it sets up the idea that there is a logical similarity between Black Men and monkeys. "Look! Even a computer thinks so!" - and that we must modify outcomes so spare Black people's feelings. Note that the alleged error wasn't in distinguishing humans from monkeys as you state in error, but Black Men specifically.

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

#167

Post by jrm4 »

nzeribe wrote: post #166
jrm4 wrote: post #141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Actually I now must strongly depart from your argument of intentionality here, and reiterate something I said before. I was about to respond to the person below, but they're more-or-less right. I don't know how intentional any of the programmers were here, so I'm not going to speculate on that. But I will absolutely insist that this racist outcome is possible -- even likely -- absent any bad intentions from the progr…

Why wouldn't you assume intentionality as more likely than not given the disturbing history of race in Silicon Valley? The position you hold out of the gate is unlikely and your assumptions of good-faith are misplaced. William Shockley, who invented the transistor and essentially set up the Valley and it's culture, was an outright white supremacist. You see his legacy in the hiring percentages. The probability is tha…

Primarily because my way is more forward looking and gets better results in the future, which is more important than punishing the past.

As I said before, I'm not here to smoke out old (or even current) racists individually. I don't think it's a valuable practice to "witch hunt" (even when the "witches" in this case are absolutely real and do exist.)

Because what that ends up doing is: every e.g. white person who's never said the n-word, or who has black people in their family, or has one black friend etc etc etc now subconsciously but completely lets themselves off the hook in any way. They get to think of themselves as superior because we've now defined racism as essentially a binary.

The above situation is mentally easier for many people (perhaps you as well) to deal with, rather than considering how deep this all goes.

Look, one wild thing you realize as a black person is that nearly everybody everywhere is to some extent surrounded by racism is that most everybody has some of it subconsciously internalized, and you don't fix it until you think about it directly, in yourself and others. I'm not a huge fan of "oh everybody's a little racist" because whoever says it is usually doing something dumb like excusing behavior -- but it's FAR closer to the truth than "if we smoke out the hidden but self-consciously racist people all will be fixed."

(so I suppose I'm saying -- yes, pay attention to what you are suggesting we pay attention to -- but also understand that it is almost CERTAINLY nowhere near sufficient to fix the problem.)

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

#168

Post by pure_simplicity »

spennant wrote: post #163
pure_simplicity wrote: post #161

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Conservative black, sorry. You failed the guessing game and proved my point that skin color correlates with opinion about as poorly as maths ability does (i.e. not meaningfully). MLK preached judging by Character instead of Color, which is referred to as color blindness. Also, the moderates of his era were moderate relative to the political landscape of their era. This is not a universal indictment, but a very cultur…

I read jrm4’s comment a little differently… It’s not that one’s skincolor correlates to opinion, but that it necessarily informs it. It’s pretty evident that people of similar skin tone and experiences may differ in opinion (just look at any family). Because of this, my takeaway wasn’t that it was the only thing that informed one’s opinion, but skin, as one of our society’s integral method for categorizing people, is…

Skin color is a very passive trait. You can choose to make it as important or unimportant as you want. People who overemphasize skin color tend to be bad people. As such, I advise you to just not pay any attention to skin color, because as soon as you try to involve race or skin color in your judgment, you by definition become racist (no matter how well intentioned you think you are). The only way to not be racist is to leave race out of the equation and judge based on universal principles, thereby treating everyone equally (and we can debate which principles are universal).

Because of that, calling your opinion a black opinion is literally an invitation to your conversation partner to become racist in their judgment, since you are trying to get your conversation partner to focus on your race when they are considering your opinion. The only right way of treating that additional and unnecessary information is to ignore it, but if it can only rightly be ignored, then it shouldn't be shared in the first place since it is an impediment to constructive dialogue.

Skin color is as important as the paint job on your car: for some people it means the world, for some people it's just a paint job. It's liberating to not care about race, you should try it.

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

#169

Post by pure_simplicity »

shashwatak wrote: post #164
pure_simplicity wrote: post #161

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Conservative black, sorry. You failed the guessing game and proved my point that skin color correlates with opinion about as poorly as maths ability does (i.e. not meaningfully). MLK preached judging by Character instead of Color, which is referred to as color blindness. Also, the moderates of his era were moderate relative to the political landscape of their era. This is not a universal indictment, but a very cultur…

Color-Blindness is not the same thing as Judging the Content of Character. Of course, we all deserve to be judged based on the content of our character and not on superficial markers like skin, gender, etc, etc, etc. However, broadly and statistically speaking, people from different economic and racial groups tend to have differing experiences, largely because of systems and not really because of any individual exper…

The moment you make race a factor in your judgment, by you have become racist by definition. The only right way to treat people is without regards to race / color, but by judging them according to universal principles.

The fundamental flaw of CRT is that it denies color-blindness. It doesn't matter that CRT claims to have good intentions for making race a factor in your judgment, it is still racist. The (progressive) eugenicists of yesteryear had good intentions too, but were horribly evil. Somehow progressives keep falling for the same trap and history keeps repeating itself. It's like racism is baked into their DNA. In every era they attempt to judge based on race and justify it with their ostensibly good intentions. It was racist then and it's racist now, but somehow the current iteration of left wing racism is just as socially acceptable and fashionable as every previous iteration.

Also I have a problem with the view that systems are the main reason for individual experiences. Two factors make up your life: your environment and your decisions. Your decisions are the most important part. No matter how good your environment, you can ruin your life by your decisions. No matter how bad your environment you can improve your life with your decisions. Constantly externalizing blame is a surefire way to short circuit the learning process that leads to self improvement. Having said that, I do agree that systems should be improved and tweaked, but it should be done carefully, because it's far easier to damage a reasonably effective complex system than to improve it.

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

#170

Post by shashwatak »

pure_simplicity wrote: post #169
shashwatak wrote: post #164

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Color-Blindness is not the same thing as Judging the Content of Character. Of course, we all deserve to be judged based on the content of our character and not on superficial markers like skin, gender, etc, etc, etc. However, broadly and statistically speaking, people from different economic and racial groups tend to have differing experiences, largely because of systems and not really because of any individual exper…

The moment you make race a factor in your judgment, by you have become racist by definition. The only right way to treat people is without regards to race / color, but by judging them according to universal principles. The fundamental flaw of CRT is that it denies color-blindness. It doesn't matter that CRT claims to have good intentions for making race a factor in your judgment, it is still racist. The (progressive)…

> The moment you make race a factor in your judgment, by you have become racist by definition.

This is not true. I just googled "racist" and it says "prejudiced against or antagonistic toward a person or people on the basis of their membership in a particular racial or ethnic group, typically one that is a minority or marginalized.".

Simply considering race doesn't automatically make it prejudiced or antagonistic.

And of course, there's also the concept of "structural racism", which is what CRT aims to help us dismantle.

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