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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

#151

Post by jrm4 »

pure_simplicity wrote: post #147
jrm4 wrote: post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yup. Though I would refine it a bit -- it's the "rush to excuse" that's the most dangerous. I don't much worry about the deliberate racist programmer as much as I worry about subconscious deliberate-or-not biases creeping in. This perfectly analogizes to most everywhere else; angry open n-word saying racists are usually powerless losers. More problems come from the larger combination of the rest of the "racism" spect…

In this case, it's not the rush to excuse that is dangerous, it's the rush to accuse that is dangerous. Innocent until proven guilty is a fundamental principle of justice. You have not demonstrated beyond reasonable doubt that this is in fact the doing of a racist, so anyone coming up with plausible alternative explanations is only doing so to prevent the discussion from devolving into a witch hunt where the guilt of…

If you follow who is saying what, I don't think you and I fundamentally disagree - or at least are not THAT far apart on this - I (the black person here who is still saying yep, my black opinion is important) have also been strongly suggesting that we not automatically attribute these problems to intentional racism.

So to clarify -- the "rush to excuse" that I'm saying is dangerous is really "the rush to insist that there is definitely no bias in play," NOT the "the rush to accuse individuals of being racist" -- and I suppose the fundamental problem I see going on here is that people can't seem to distinguish these two things, even though they are very different.

I'm going to keep saying this: the biggest problem is not smoking out hardcore racists who openly hate, the biggest problem is getting much of the non-black tech populace to even begin this conversation without the hypersensitivity kicking in (fully acknowledging that, while I'm not a fan of the terms "SJW" and "woke" and such, there also absolutely exists a naive liberal left that presently makes this conversation harder because they lean too hard into their particular direction)

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

#152

Post by pure_simplicity »

jrm4 wrote: post #148
pure_simplicity wrote: post #146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> " 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." We used to think of this as racist stereotyping, but in the pendulum of history we have swung back to where in order to not be racist (or, better yet, anti-racist) we…

A little exhausting to, as always, have to thread the needle and calm things down, but let's try again. My insistence on what I said isn't about anything permanent or immutable. This is about what I hope to be a temporary state of affairs, namely that -- it is at least plausible that the lack of black folks in tech today is leading to unintended negative consequences, and perhaps we should talk about that directly wi…

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 nothing black or white about your opinion (in terms of skin color at least) or anyone else's opinions. There are white people that think like you, and there are black people that think unlike you.

Having a certain skin color doesn't make your opinion more valid or more worthy of being listened to either, even if you are in a demographic minority. For your opinion to be valid it has to have merit, so you have to back it up with good arguments that can convince a reasonable person. There's no racial cheat code we can/should insert into public discourse to bypass rational evaluation. That would be the bigotry of low expectations (you can't argue effectively for your case because of your identity, so we're gonna accept your conclusion because of your identity).

Shifting from the indefensible: "my opinions are absolutely related to my skin color and that's precisely why you all need to pay special attention to them" to the much milder and very different: "[it's] plausible that the lack of black folks in tech today is leading to unintended negative consequences", and glossing that over as "maybe I didn't quite say this in the exact way that won't set people off the first time", rather than admitting you were racially stereotyping yourself and (at least implicitly) other individuals is poor form. That's not a clarification, but a different argument. I think it's high time white leftists and leftist blacks confront their own racism, cuz that's the only form of socially acceptable racism that currently exists in the west.

Having said that, I think there's not much interesting about the hypothetical you raised. Changing the demographic composition of any group of people is almost certainly gonna change the distribution of opinions on the spectrum on any given topic, but that does not mean we are getting closer to truth. In the end, all that should matter is the facts and the arguments. That's why slavery and segregation were abolished at a time when blacks were vastly outnumbered in the population and in politics.

We don't need population level representation of blacks in tech (though it may be beneficial) to hold big tech accountable and achieve meaningful change, we just have to make the argument and raise awareness and reasonable people of all races will join in your cause if your argument has merit. Let's get back to MLK's ideal of color blindness, because those who are teaching us to see color are teaching us to hate each other.

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

#153

Post by skinkestek »

pc86 wrote: post #150
skinkestek wrote: post #137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What should have happened is they did basic testing up front? And since they fixed it right away small fines only, like nuisance small. And small follow up.

You didn't answer the question. Fine for what ? Are you suggesting broken AI models should incur criminal charges? What exactly are they being fined for?

I'm suggesting that when companies that print money have so broken AI models that the confuse dark skinned humans for animals we should incentivize them to fix it.

If this ends up giving entry level jobs to people who have a hard time entering tech so they can help testing this, I can live with that too.

But frankly, I don't see your point: is it OK to call dark skinned people monkeys if the system who does it is automated && the company who run it is willing to apologize and stop it after getting caught?

PS: this is a weird situation for me, I'm a normal white bloke, not woke or anything, I just try to push companies to show basic decency.

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

#154

Post by dagmx »

salawat wrote: post #144
dagmx wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is usually a good example of societal bias compounding. It's possible that nobody directly involved in this was actively racist, but we're building on centuries of racism in every facet. So a little bit of bias in each technology and data set involved, not to mention the engineers and their testing, just adds up

>but we're building on centuries of racism in every facet. Nooo. We're building on techniques that have worked well enough up til now, but people don't bother to dig in a d come to terms with what's actually going on. Not everything is racist. It's more a tyranny of 'good enough' and convenience.

So you're saying there's no bias in the data sets , or in society? Do you think that someone who thinks there's no bias in their dataset would then dig in to see what's going on? Do you think people are going to recognize the negative biases in the data if they don't face those issues themselves?

Bigotry is part of society, because it's existed for so long and still does. It doesn't mean that everyone is actively racist. It just means you can't just say there's no bigotry affecting things, and in saying there isn't, you're now blinding yourself to the possibility of negative biases.

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

#155

Post by dv_dt »

salawat wrote: post #144
dagmx wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is usually a good example of societal bias compounding. It's possible that nobody directly involved in this was actively racist, but we're building on centuries of racism in every facet. So a little bit of bias in each technology and data set involved, not to mention the engineers and their testing, just adds up

>but we're building on centuries of racism in every facet. Nooo. We're building on techniques that have worked well enough up til now, but people don't bother to dig in a d come to terms with what's actually going on. Not everything is racist. It's more a tyranny of 'good enough' and convenience.

Once we know about the the systemic bias, even if accumulated unintentionally - then what do we do about it. I think we are obligated morally and technically to do more after that point.

A similar situation exists with accommodation of people with disabilities. Once you know a building architecture can shut out people by design decisions- at some point we worked through at least some basic level of agreement on principle that accommodation is required.

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

#156

Post by com2kid »

kroltan wrote: post #75
hn_throwaway_99 wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Google's street directions also fail miserably with international road names. Words are fine, but person names or abbreviations will often use the English pronunciation which can be inexact or even incomprehensible. For example: In Brazil, the major roadways are named with the initial code of the state, or BR if it's a federal road, and a bunch of numbers. So BR-101, for example. These are never named in full, so som…

Google still fails with American roads that have names in the local Natives American language.

It has gotten better, but even in 2018 it should have been in- excusable to be mispronouncing names that badly.

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

#157

Post by shadowgovt »

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…

All of this is correct.

Neural nets, in particular, aren't objective... They're bias-learning engines. Their whole raison d'etre is to take (in this case) a bunch of images and go "Okay... Humans believe these random patterns of pixels have semantically different meanings. I'm going to try to explore a space of what those differences could be until they tell me I got it right." If there are things we as humans care about classifying differently that we fail to tell the computer, it won't know to separate them.

The fact we keep making this mistake is a real problem. And it's a human problem, not an algorithm problem.

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

#158

Post by jessaustin »

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.

Some people want to police AI behavior. Others want to police people's opinions of AI behavior.

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

#159

Post by tm11zz »

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…

[flagged]

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

#160

Post by shashwatak »

pure_simplicity wrote: post #152
jrm4 wrote: post #148

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A little exhausting to, as always, have to thread the needle and calm things down, but let's try again. My insistence on what I said isn't about anything permanent or immutable. This is about what I hope to be a temporary state of affairs, namely that -- it is at least plausible that the lack of black folks in tech today is leading to unintended negative consequences, and perhaps we should talk about that directly wi…

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.
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