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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'

#171

Post by elmomle »

oreilles wrote: post #75
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:/…

This isn't a problem with diversity. Everybody knows how to pronounce Malcom X. And it's not like just because a google engineer was black that he was like "oh, let's try and see if Malcom X is pronounced correctly because he's black and I'm black too". This only happens in white people's brain.

The implication is that a black person would be more likely to recognize the inherent flaw in automatically interpreting "X" as "10", and in all honestly that's probably true. It isn't a matter of testing, it's a matter of having people with a diverse set of cultural perspectives in the room when decisions like that are made to begin with.

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

#172

Post by jessaustin »

handmodel wrote: post #165
jessaustin wrote: post #160

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In what universe is "Ten" a more common pronunciation of "X" than "X"? You might have an argument for "II" or "III", but I'll be shocked if any street in USA is named after the tenth generation of really unimaginative namers.

Do you think Google is having someone go through the tens of thousands of street names? Or do you think they had a team (on a completely different project or perhaps company) write a text to speech function that wasn't well suited for directions. Streets have lots of numbers after all. People frequently have numbers in their name.

I could see that for Google Maps v1.0. I think we're past that point now. There's no reason they should still be using libraries suited to parsing the names of forgotten European monarchs.

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

#173

Post by root_axis »

ipaddr wrote: post #158
root_axis wrote: post #149

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, wo…

That raises the question, is it embarrassing or an expected mistake to be learned from. Many things are mislabel many things are labelled properly but we never say AI must feel pride at the good labeling job why would we give emotions to an emotionless system?

> it embarrassing or an expected mistake to be learned from.

I would say it's both. It's embarrassing for Facebook because it looks racist even though it really isn't. The system might be emotionless but the people who interact with it aren't, and we don't expect them to be.

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

#174

Post by ALittleLight »

6gvONxR4sf7o wrote: post #97
ALittleLight wrote: post #49

The video features white and black men. It seems like concluding the algorithm is calling black men primates is the same kind of error people are accusing the algorithm/Facebook of. i.e. The reason you think it's racist is because you assume it's talking about black people specifically suggesting you think the word is more apt to describe black people. Primates and humans are similar labels. This was almost certainly…

We’re assuming it because that’s exactly what has happened with other products in the past. It’s an issue the field has struggled with, so it seems likely.

Maybe I'm not aware of what you're referring to, but I don't think so. I think, like this incident, companies apologize for stuff like this because they lack the courage to say the truth, which is that it's an unfortunate labeling error but not a big deal. Instead, they judge it to be more political to beg forgiveness. Of course, the people who get offended by labeling errors are only encouraged by apologies and use them as evidence of wrongdoing.

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

#175

Post by t-3 »

__MatrixMan__ wrote: post #101
exporectomy wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Gorillas have black and human-like faces. I think they're just quite similar so AI can more easily confuse them.

Is it even a confusion? Humans are primates. It's weird that it selected such a broad label, but it didn't select an incorrect label.

"Human supremacist" attitudes are incredibly common. Look at any discussion of animal intelligence and you'll see the most vehement denials of any possibility that our cognition and emotions aren't unique in the world.

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

#176

Post by Helloworldboy »

OneEyedRobot wrote: post #85
exporectomy wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Us humans are super good at distinguishing faces. So what's obviously different to us might not be so clear to an AI or another species.

>Us humans are super good at distinguishing faces. It would be interesting to test a bunch of midwesterners at their ability to tell Asians apart or to be able to distinguish various Asian ethnicities. My guess is that a lot of the distinguishing features that they look for are altered or missing.

Do you think that there aren’t large asian populations in the midwest? Do you think the entirety of the midwest consists of rural white populations? Most of the country by landmass consists of rural white communities, not only the midwest. Sounds like you may have some innate bias that you need to sort out yourself

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

#177

Post by jessaustin »

scrollaway wrote: post #166
jessaustin wrote: post #160

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In what universe is "Ten" a more common pronunciation of "X" than "X"? You might have an argument for "II" or "III", but I'll be shocked if any street in USA is named after the tenth generation of really unimaginative namers.

"(name) (Roman numeral)" is a much more commong occurence than "(name) (Single letter spelled out)". So to answer your question, this one. This universe. And no, nobody "programmed this". I don't know how anyone of decent technical competence can think that. The workaround has likely been hardcoded in some way, if anything. How can you possibly think that someone at google decided it would be funny to program, on pur…

Is it sometimes a challenge to navigate in areas where streets like e.g. "Louis XXII" and "Louis XXIII" are near each other?

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

#178

Post by SilverRed »

silisili wrote: post #170

I've been trying to avoid controversy lately, but hey, here's one to downvote. Have we considered AI and ML as a general brain replacement is a failed idea? That we humans feel we are so smart we can recreate or exceed millions of year evolution of a human brain? I'd never call AI a waste, it's not. But getting it to do human things just may be. Even a child can tell the difference between a human of any color and an…

No it isn't a failed idea at all. The products out today are remarkably useful even if not perfect. I have tested out the google lens thing on google photos and it is astounding.

I took a photo of the water pump from a car windscreen wiper and google was able to correctly identify what it was. I took a photo of a generic PCB which showed the back of a driver board for an LCD and google was able to bring up the exact type of board it was with the names of the ICs on it.

In these examples, google photos ai has far exceeded what the average human can achieve. We just have to keep in mind that these systems are not perfect and only a best guess which should be verified by a person later.

The problem here is not that the mistake was very costly or disruptive to the function of the feature, but that the mistake was highly offensive which is something very hard to avoid.

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

#179

Post by SamReidHughes »

firefoxd wrote: post #145

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 th…

They already get hired, when they meet the hiring bar.

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

#180

Post by IncRnd »

MattGaiser wrote: post #167
ineedasername wrote: post #156

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Our ability for pattern recognition w/ human faces developed over the course of many thousands of years. People in modern fire fighting gear weren't present through that process. A kid thinking a firefighter is a robot is not the same class of problem. Even kids are good at the type of tasks we're talking about.

People have difficulty distinguishing the individual faces of other races. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cross-race_effect So at some level it breaks down for us too.

The cross-race effect is an instance of the ingroup advantage. However, that can't be extended to say that people will classify blacks as primates.
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