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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'

#201

Post by silisili »

3grdlurker wrote: post #191
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…

Couldn’t you apply the same way of thinking to finding a cure for AIDS, or doing interstellar travel, or P = NP, or pretty much any problem that we haven’t solved yet? Just because we can’t solve a problem within our lifetime doesn’t mean it’s not solvable at all. This is one of the most basic principles by which knowledge, and therefore, technology, progresses.

Not at all. If a child could solve the AIDS issue and science couldn't, then maybe.

Humans and machines are so different today. Of course machines beat us at number calculations and such. But we have organs that computers don't and can't have. And our brains are much more in tune with using those than power of 2 bit twiddling.

As we ourselves don't understand how it works, how can we ever write a machine that does?

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

#202

Post by ironmagma »

IncRnd wrote: post #137
ironmagma wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Even if it was fixed, in a probabilistic system like this, isn't it basically guaranteed to happen with some inputs?

Is that a real question? Of course it will happen. In this particular case there was a single misclassified video reported in the article.

Yes it's a real question, since there's nothing that says that a particular misclassification must happen. Watching cars go by on the road, one might suspect that at least one is driven by an alligator, but nothing says that it must be, per se, even the law of large numbers.

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

#203

Post by saltyfamiliar »

crooked-v wrote: post #189
root_axis wrote: post #173

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

> it looks racist even though it really isn't It absolutely is racist. Racist outcomes are still racist regardless of whether there's a guy in Klansmen robes at the steering wheel or not.

How is it a racist outcome? This has nothing to do with the belief that one "race" is inherently better than another. It's a simple categorization error due to insufficient training data.

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

#204

Post by wtmt »

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…

> "(name) (Roman numeral)" is a much more commong occurence than "(name) (Single letter spelled out)"

> So to answer your question, this one. This universe.

But this is true in this universe only in some countries and places. There are many countries and places where an initial would follow the name and it is the legal name.

This is precisely the problem with the data/algorithm as well as your argument. They’re not well formed for different contexts and need to have more context sensitivity.

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

#205

Post by crooked-v »

exporectomy wrote: post #57
userbinator wrote: post #19

The AI is very honest and innocent, it doesn't know what political correctness is. I've heard stories of parents whose kids would also mislabel a black human as a gorilla.

People need to learn to cope with the difference between innocent mistakes and expressions of genuine feelings of contempt/etc.

An 'innocent mistake' performed by a megacorporation with bajillions of dollars, of exactly the same kind of error that has publicly appeared in the actions of other megacorporations with bajillions of dollars... at that point it's not a 'mistake', it's just the people in charge not caring.

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

#206

Post by ZephyrBlu »

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]

> sorry it seems discussion about solutions to racial issues isn't welcome here

Oddly it seems like you are the person who doesn't want to have a discussion.

You stated "As an ML engineer I can tell you confidently here's how you fix these systems" and people critiqued your solution. Is that not being open to discussion?

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

#207

Post by sandworm101 »

throwaway675309 wrote: post #195
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.

Oh for Pete's sake, absolute bloody conspiracy level nonsense, NOBODY sat there twirling their villainous mustache and programmed an exception to hardcode pronouncing X as 10, it's simply a matter of the training and sample data having access to some type of corpus that contained a great deal of Roman numerals. (Leave the software engineering to the software engineers)

>> to some type of corpus that contained a great deal of Roman numerals.

I wager that there is more text online about Louis XIV than of Malcom X. Certainly there are many more books on that epic corner of French history than one modern US leader. Then there are all the British kings. Point an AI at the internet and it likely would decide that roman numerals are most often pronounced as number than letters. Malcom X would be rare an exception that might need to be hard coded.

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

#208

Post by dheera »

ZephyrBlu wrote: post #206
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]

> sorry it seems discussion about solutions to racial issues isn't welcome here Oddly it seems like you are the person who doesn't want to have a discussion. You stated " As an ML engineer I can tell you confidently here's how you fix these systems " and people critiqued your solution. Is that not being open to discussion?

Critiques and debates are fine, but downvotes don't encourage discussion, they scream "shut up" and disincentivize speaking about the issue ever again, and downrank a viewpoint instead of leaving it up for fair discussion.

Because presumably, if it works like many other systems, if you get downvoted enough, you probably get banned, so it means I should be scared to say what I said again.

If people were interested in debating like mature adults without downvoting then I would have left it up and continued the discussion.

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

#209

Post by nostromo »

silisili wrote: post #146
gumboshoes wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

It’s an inevitable result of angry mobs (like this article and entire HN thread) and risk-intolerant corporations.

It’s impossible to test every image for accuracy and to guarantee it won’t happen again, so they just sidestep it entirely.

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

#210

Post by zozbot234 »

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:/…

> Then Google Maps was like, 'turn right on Malcolm Ten Boulevard' and I knew there were no black engineers working there

Silly Google TTS, the proper pronunciation is obviously "Malcolm the Tenth" there.

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