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Instagram apologizes for inserting 'terrorist' into Palestinian bio translations

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Re: Instagram apologizes for inserting 'terrorist' into Palestinian bio translations

#31

Post by olliej »

f233f2 wrote: post #25
matsemann wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How is this "outrage bait"? It describes an event that happened quite accurately, and how the issue came to be is something worth discussing and reflecting on.

The title is outrage bait. It wasn't adding "terrorist" to all translation of Palestinian bios, only to those that included a very specific phrase, and also the translation didn't make it sound like the user himself was a terrorist, since it talked about terrorists in an impersonal way.

You mean the extremely common phrase "praise be to god"? But if you put a Palestinian flag in your bio it says "Palestinian terrorists are fighting for their freedom".

That's not (1) an impersonal way, and (2) saying "Palestinian terrorists are fighting for their freedom" which is an extremely strong statement in support of terrorist, and given the overwhelming amount islamaphobic reporting giving racist shitheads the ability to point to all the "pro terrorist muslims" seems pretty on the nose.

Here's the question you should ask, are the pro-israel bios being updated with "IDF terrorists are fighting for their ownership of Palestine"?

JFC the contortions some people make to act like this shit is reasonable is beyond me.

Re: Instagram apologizes for inserting 'terrorist' into Palestinian bio translations

#32

Post by kibibu »

mcguire wrote: post #24
nerdponx wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Notice that GP said "machine translation", not "AI". Let's think of it instead as a "nonlinear high-dimensional sequence translation model trained on some large and unknown corpus". Does that make it less problematic?

How is that not AI?

Statistical machine translation is one of those areas that was considered AI until it worked, then it just became tech.

See also: speech recognition, grammar checking, OCR, theorem proving

Re: Instagram apologizes for inserting 'terrorist' into Palestinian bio translations

#33

Post by i_have_an_idea »

permo-w wrote: post #17
elil17 wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If a human translator translated "Praise god" as "Palestinian terrorists are fighting for their freedom" I'm pretty sure they'd be fired immediately. In contrast, Instagram is not going to be taking down their machine translation tool.

not AI /= human

AI /= LLM

Re: Instagram apologizes for inserting 'terrorist' into Palestinian bio translations

#34

Post by BillyTheMage »

elil17 wrote: post #21
f233f2 wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are we really at the point where we need a disclaimer saying "automatic translations may not be accurate"?

I think the average person doesn't understand at all what level of accuracy they can expect from AI tools. That is why you have professors relying on ChatGPT to tell them if a student cheated using ChatGPT. HN readers already know not to trust it of course.

The average person sees it as "AI" like we think of from the movies. It's a machine brain that can think and communicate. In reality it's just a really good text generator that's really good at sounding confident.

Re: Instagram apologizes for inserting 'terrorist' into Palestinian bio translations

#35

Post by [deleted] »

greenie_beans wrote: post #29

I asked ChatGPT what the Great March of Return was: > The Great March of Return was a series of Palestinian protests organized by various groups, including Hamas, to demand the right of Palestinian refugees and their descendants to return to their ancestral homes in what is now Israel. The protests took place along the border between the Gaza Strip and Israel and were intended to draw attention to the Palestinian ref…

[deleted]

Re: Instagram apologizes for inserting 'terrorist' into Palestinian bio translations

#36

Post by dmix »

BillyTheMage wrote: post #34
elil17 wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the average person doesn't understand at all what level of accuracy they can expect from AI tools. That is why you have professors relying on ChatGPT to tell them if a student cheated using ChatGPT. HN readers already know not to trust it of course.

The average person sees it as "AI" like we think of from the movies. It's a machine brain that can think and communicate. In reality it's just a really good text generator that's really good at sounding confident.

Oversimplifying things doesn’t help anyone here.

People don’t understand the limitations of AI/LLMs because it wasn’t a normal part of their lives until recently. They don’t need to understand how it works to understand that it has limitations and it’s going to be occasionally wrong.

The average person is well aware software isn’t perfect, things break all the time. This is no different.

It’s not a leap to think people will start grasping what current AI can and can’t do simply through a) careful communication and mostly importantly b) using it themselves.

Much of the talk about AI safety is just an elaborate dance around this idea that users will never understand the limitations and will freak out. But these high profile cases (and warning labels) are exactly how people will learn the flaws exist and they’ll get used to the process of it getting slowly better and better.

Re: Instagram apologizes for inserting 'terrorist' into Palestinian bio translations

#38

Post by O1111OOO »

Performed a quick search for ex-cia working at instagram and came up with a ton of hits related to general information about ex-government agents working in key positions at many tech firms.

https://start.duckduckgo.com/?q=ex+cia+working+at+instagram&...

I'm not saying this translation error is related to that. I'm also not saying it isn't.

Re: Instagram apologizes for inserting 'terrorist' into Palestinian bio translations

#39

Post by alistairSH »

elil17 wrote: post #3

This is the sort of thing that could cause people to lose friends or jobs. This is exactly the sort of thing we should be worried about with AI. I feel like machine translations like those on Instagram should come with a disclaimer (in bold, not fine print!).

Is there any indication this was a machine/AI translation and not a human?
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