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Facebook apology as AI labels black men 'primates'

bbc.com

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Re: Facebook apology as AI labels black men 'primates'

#111

Post by MattGaiser »

JasonFruit wrote: post #62
MattGaiser wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would be interested to know if young children would do much better in many cases. When I was quite young, I referred to some firefighters as robots.

It reminds me of some of the explorers' tales of people who were half-human, half some other animal, or of people covered in hair, the first of which may have originated from seeing people riding animals, and the others to various (actual) primates. If humans can make such mistakes, certainly Facebook's AI can be excused for its confusion.

Apparently we are not sure whether the original term Gorillai referred to people or gorillas.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gorilla#Etymology

Re: Facebook apology as AI labels black men 'primates'

#112

Post by klyrs »

JasonFruit wrote: post #62
MattGaiser wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would be interested to know if young children would do much better in many cases. When I was quite young, I referred to some firefighters as robots.

It reminds me of some of the explorers' tales of people who were half-human, half some other animal, or of people covered in hair, the first of which may have originated from seeing people riding animals, and the others to various (actual) primates. If humans can make such mistakes, certainly Facebook's AI can be excused for its confusion.

Are you sure those were honest mistakes and not stories for the sake of storytelling? And no, prehistoric ignorance does not justify this system making it to production.

Re: Facebook apology as AI labels black men 'primates'

#113

Post by [deleted] »

TaylorAlexander wrote: post #109
dimitrios1 wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Haven't you heard? Words are literal violence and making me feel unsafe . This cannot stand, and the situation must be rectified, otherwise you are complicit.

You’re engaging in precisely the inflammatory rhetoric you seem to disagree with. EDIT: Hard to tell these days but other comments suggest the parent was being sarcastic.

[deleted]

Re: Facebook apology as AI labels black men 'primates'

#114

Post by tcmart14 »

JCharante wrote: post #103
tcmart14 wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't know if I 100% align up with how you stated it, but yea, its a matter of training data set. I don't think these companies have published their training data set. But thinking back on the issue with asians and facial recognition on Apple's face ID. If they just choose 100 people at random, based off US statistics, 5-6 of those 100 people would have been Asian. And that reflects the 5.7 percent of the populatio…

I wonder what the datasets of companies like Xiaomi look like. FaceID always worked for me, so it seems like it works for non-asian faces.

Maybe they took more caution to their data set. I think the only way we would know is if they publish their sets or how they built them. But I was just highlighting maybe one possible case that Apple could have generated their training set, just grab 100 people in America at random.

Re: Facebook apology as AI labels black men 'primates'

#115

Post by chrisseaton »

Cycl0ps wrote: post #88

I don't like these stories. It always trends towards the most inflammatory arguments, those being inherint bias and unconscious racism put upon our technology. Real issues in those topics aside, are any articles like this doing anything but feeding flames and generating ad revenue? Instead, I want to talk about pareidolia. Humans are social creatures. We have evolved to identify others of our kind and read their expr…

> I don't like these stories.

Nobody likes the stories. No reasonable person is celebrating them. You’re not in disagreement with anyone.

Re: Facebook apology as AI labels black men 'primates'

#117

Post by nashequilibrium »

Cycl0ps wrote: post #88

I don't like these stories. It always trends towards the most inflammatory arguments, those being inherint bias and unconscious racism put upon our technology. Real issues in those topics aside, are any articles like this doing anything but feeding flames and generating ad revenue? Instead, I want to talk about pareidolia. Humans are social creatures. We have evolved to identify others of our kind and read their expr…

I think your comment is a bit dismissive. Facebook is not the first to encounter this, it happened 6/7 years ago and they should have known better. Secondly, if the Data Scientist working on this were all black, this would not have happened, just like the automatic soap dispensers in bathrooms.

Re: Facebook apology as AI labels black men 'primates'

#118

Post by sinyug »

travisporter wrote: post #92
sinyug wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> This only happens in white people's brain. 'Eleven Jinping': Indian TV fires anchor over blooper.[1] [1] https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-india-29274792

To play devil advocate, maybe the station fired her for ignorance of current events.

> maybe the station fired her for ignorance of current events.

That would be a valid reason, but I suspect a more culturally appropriate one: loss of reputation. We are sensitive to that.

My point was this isn't something that only goes on in 'white' brains but more of a cultural issue. Most people in the West are incapable of pronouncing Asian names. I don't see people making a big issue out of it.

Re: Facebook apology as AI labels black men 'primates'

#119

Post by anyfactor »

dheera wrote: post #90
IncRnd wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The reason these companies don't fix these systems is because they don't know how. It is easier to remove certain outputs or retire the whole system. There is no line of code they can tweak.

[self-censored to prevent further downvotes because HN is downvoting me for what I said and the delete button is gone; sorry it seems discussion about solutions to racial issues isn't welcome here]

I second this but not for the conventional reasons of diversity but the subtleties diversity could be difficult to understand.

You need your consumer base to be represented in your product development system. In training an AI model we first test things with what we are personally have a bias for.

For example in training a stock prediction model, I am going to first test it with the most familiar stocks that I know or I have bias for. And I am going to adjust my model until I find the model being correct for my bias then test it across a larger dataset.

I don't work in AI but I know that test data is incredibly large and they supposedly systematically cover all bases. But what I am saying is this the chance of random events will go down when you deviate from a homogenous development team where everyone is biased towards the same things because they share cultural and racial overlaps.

Re: Facebook apology as AI labels black men 'primates'

#120

Post by jeromic »

scotty79 wrote: post #5

Is that a result of a skewed training set or are people really hard to tell apart from gorillas if there are no obvious tells like large difference in brightness of different areas of the face?

There is evidence that CNN's use texture features more than shape features, i.e. have a texture bias. It's hard to tell in this case without access to the data/model, but it's very possible colour is being overvalued by the classifier and causes the errors.
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