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Facebook apology as AI labels black men 'primates'

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

#141

Post by throwcommonsns »

wpietri wrote: post #60
simonw wrote: post #15

This happened to both Google Photos and Flickr too. Which makes it an inexcusable mistake to make in 2021 - how are you not testing for this? Google Photos in 2015: https://www.wired.com/story/when-it-comes-to-gorillas-google... Flickr in 2015: https://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/gadgets-and-tech/ne...

This reminds me of a favorite tweet from 2013: "Then Google Maps was like, 'turn right on Malcolm Ten Boulevard' and I knew there were no black engineers working there" -- https://twitter.com/alliebland/status/402990270402543616 Facebook, like a lot of tech companies, has long had problems with diversity in engineering. Here's an article from April that discusses specific incidents and the broader background: https:/…

This is a contrarian take that may get me downvoted and unfairly labeled, but I encourage critical thinking instead:

I've struggled with people telling me that these FAANG companies have "diversity problems," as a person of color myself. A majority of software engineers are female and male immigrants from East Asia and South Asia. These population centers are some of the most diverse regions of the world. The engineers who have been hired by preparing for and passing these companies' selective merit based coding tests had to overcome adverse conditions in their home countries as well, including extreme poverty, starvation, and totalitarian regimes.

Why do they not count toward diversity, to some white and white-adjacent critics? What message are we sending to people who are ethnic minorities from certain groups who earned their spots through merit and have also been targeted in recent newsworthy attacks, just as others have, when we make these kinds of accusations? What does a non problematic ethnic composition look like? What are these companies doing right toward some minority groups and wrong towards others?

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

#142

Post by atkailash »

sinyug wrote: post #118
travisporter wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

If you don’t speak the language of course you’re going to mess up names. But having the self awareness to ask before butchering it, or asking to be corrected, is a human issue in general not specific to any particular heritage

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

#143

Post by oefrha »

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]

It’s a probabilistic system. It can give you correct results on one billion samples and still get the 1,000,000,001st case wrong. How do you test every single photo from the past and future?

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

#144

Post by fighterpilot »

anyfactor wrote: post #119
dheera wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[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 o…

"You need your consumer base to be represented in your product development system."

This is not the real motivation for diversity initiatives since otherwise you would see a push to hire more old Republicans.

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

#145

Post by firefoxd »

This happens because there are no black people of consequence in the ML pipeline. In my previous company Everytime we built a new model, a bunch of us would test it. Being the only black person in the company, I often found some very odd things and we would correct it before shipping.

I understand that fb is a much bigger scale, but all the reason to have a much more diverse set of eyes to test their models before they go live.

If you want to avoid this, hire more black people, seriously.

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

#146

Post by silisili »

gumboshoes wrote: post #22
simonw wrote: post #15

This happened to both Google Photos and Flickr too. Which makes it an inexcusable mistake to make in 2021 - how are you not testing for this? Google Photos in 2015: https://www.wired.com/story/when-it-comes-to-gorillas-google... Flickr in 2015: https://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/gadgets-and-tech/ne...

Google Photos solved the problem by simply returning no results for words like gorilla, monkey, primate, etc.

So disappointing. I was legitimately looking for a monkey pic I took years ago to no avail because of no searchability. One of the richest companies in the world prefers to just remove ability than to solve hard problems. But hey, at least we all get ads.

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

#147

Post by [deleted] »

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…

[deleted]

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

#148

Post by atkailash »

sinyug wrote: post #100
wpietri wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This reminds me of a favorite tweet from 2013: "Then Google Maps was like, 'turn right on Malcolm Ten Boulevard' and I knew there were no black engineers working there" -- https://twitter.com/alliebland/status/402990270402543616 Facebook, like a lot of tech companies, has long had problems with diversity in engineering. Here's an article from April that discusses specific incidents and the broader background: https:/…

> Facebook, like a lot of tech companies, has long had problems with diversity in engineering. If that is the case, why is it that Google voice nav routinely butchers the names of places and roads in India in spite of having thousands of Indian engineers on staff? Could we blame the intractability of the problem, or just plain old incompetence, before we blame every single problem in the world on racism and lack of '…

There’s a lot of streets in my state that it gets wrong too. If it was biased toward English or “White” names shouldn’t it pronounce those sufficiently? It seems like cherry picking to say “hey it pronounced this wrong, it’s a racist system” when it isn’t even getting the supposed counter examples correct

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

#149

Post by root_axis »

I think the negative reaction is reasonable. Clearly, if a human did this it would a problem, so why should it be acceptable for an automated system to do the same thing? The fact that it is unintentional doesn't negate the fact that it's an embarrassing mistake.

On the other hand, imagine a world where these labels were applied by a massive team of humans instead of a deep learning algorithm. At Facebook's scale, would the photos end up with more or less racist labels on average over time? My guess is that the model does a better job, but this is just another example of why we should be wary about trusting ML systems with important work.

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

#150

Post by ummonk »

sinyug wrote: post #100
wpietri wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This reminds me of a favorite tweet from 2013: "Then Google Maps was like, 'turn right on Malcolm Ten Boulevard' and I knew there were no black engineers working there" -- https://twitter.com/alliebland/status/402990270402543616 Facebook, like a lot of tech companies, has long had problems with diversity in engineering. Here's an article from April that discusses specific incidents and the broader background: https:/…

> Facebook, like a lot of tech companies, has long had problems with diversity in engineering. If that is the case, why is it that Google voice nav routinely butchers the names of places and roads in India in spite of having thousands of Indian engineers on staff? Could we blame the intractability of the problem, or just plain old incompetence, before we blame every single problem in the world on racism and lack of '…

Another example: Apple Maps pronounces “Jai Ho” as “high hoe”. Apparently Apple has too many Latino engineers and not enough Indian engineers?
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