Facebook apology as AI labels black men 'primates' • Hacker News Board

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

#231

Post by ShamelessC » Tue, Sep 07, 2021, 4:23 AM UTC

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…

> Have we considered AI and ML as a general brain replacement is a failed idea?

Yes. It is currently known to fail at this prospect. It is an open research question as to whether current methods can be merely "scaled up" using more compute to achieve "general brain replacement". I personally am skeptical about that considering basic problems such as concept drift (but I am by no means an expert).

You define what constitutes as valuable to be arbitrarily difficult/inconceivable with current methods (because it's an area of open research) and then say we should divert course merely because we don't know it's possible?

> never call AI a waste, it's not. But getting it to do human things just may be.

It already can do things thought to be previously exclusively "human" (such as beating Go). Recently it also helped make significant advancements for protein folding which are sure to yield benefits to medical science at least indirectly. I believe this statement is either incorrect, or you're expecting people to have some strange definition of "exclusively human", which is of course also open research and unanswered.

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

#232

Post by User23 » Tue, Sep 07, 2021, 4:24 AM UTC

dheera wrote: post #208

ZephyrBlu wrote: post #206

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

The moderators here are exceedingly reasonable. Don’t worry about getting banned on account of downvotes unless you’re violating the guidelines. And the staff at hn@ycombinator.com is shockingly responsive for a site of this size. They really do want to encourage intellectual curiosity.

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

#233

Post by Cycl0ps » Tue, Sep 07, 2021, 4:30 AM UTC

makeitdouble wrote: post #126

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…

You put a strong focus on how we evolved to deeply care about small facial expression differences and face features to identify and interact with an individual. These stories are about how we also deeply care about labels and categorization. Aren't we just looking at the natural selection (making them not "last long") of these way too rough AIs that step on bounderies that are pretty important to a lot of people ?

Ha! I like that! Yes, I guess in a way we are. These models are always being evolved in their own version of 'natural' selection. They go through tens of thousands of mutations before finding one that guesses well enough to be pushed to production. This is just another stage of that algorithms life cycle I suppose. If you want to take an optimistic view of it this is just another part of the tuning process. The AI can train for as long as it likes, but the real thing it's being weighted against is public outcry.

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

#234

Post by jcims » Tue, Sep 07, 2021, 4:37 AM UTC

jcims wrote: post #23

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...

Why are you so sure they aren't testing for it? Bias finds a way.

Curious if anyone on HN has built a testing framework to catch this kind of issue.

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

#235

Post by ironmagma » Tue, Sep 07, 2021, 4:39 AM UTC

IncRnd wrote: post #215

ironmagma wrote: post #202

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Nobody said this particular misclassification must occur. But there will be misclassifications, which is what your original question asked. Since you know the answer, why ask the question? That's why I asked you if what you asked was a real question.

Yes they did, I said that. But it was a claim made as a question, because I didn't know whether it was actually true. I still can't demonstrate formally why this would be so, because again, the reasoning and even veracity of the claim is still in question due to lack of anything but a hand-waved answer.

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

#236

Post by [deleted] » Tue, Sep 07, 2021, 4:45 AM UTC

firefoxd wrote: post #217

joebob42 wrote: post #213

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not obvious to me what black people would have done to fix this specific problem. Would they have said "oh we should make sure to test the algorithm on blurry images of people in a forest and make sure it doesn't get confused"?

"I uploaded my picture and it says I'm a monkey" "Oh, maybe we should look into that"

[deleted]

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

#237

Post by skissane » Tue, Sep 07, 2021, 4:50 AM UTC

mrpopo wrote: post #169

throwcommonsns wrote: post #141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 enginee…

> These population centers are some of the most diverse regions of the world. South Asia and SE Asia, maybe. But East Asia (NE China, Korea, Japan) has actually one of the most ethnically "pure" populations in the world.

> South Asia and SE Asia, maybe. But East Asia (NE China, Korea, Japan) has actually one of the most ethnically "pure" populations in the world.

Northeast China–usually defined as the provinces of Liaoning, Jilin, and Heilongjiang–does not belong on your list. According to the 2000 Chinese census, about 10% of the population of Northeast China comes from ethnic minorities – the majority of whom are Manchus, but also including significant numbers of Mongols and Koreans. That is far from being 'one of the most ethnically "pure" populations in the world'-especially when compared to Japan or Korea.

Indeed, even though Northeast China was (in 2000) approximately 90% Han, prior to the 19th century Han were a minority in the region, and Manchus were the numerically (and politically) dominant ethnic group.

According to the 2000 Census, the most ethnically homogenous part of China is not the North or Northeast, but rather Eastern China, which is over 99% Han (and, as well as being over 99% Han overall, 4 of its 7 provinces are over 99% Han too.) By contrast, North China is about 94% Han and Northeast China is only around 90% Han.

(There have been two Chinese censuses since, in 2010 and 2020, but I can't find ethnicity figures for them.)

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

#238

Post by mastazi » Tue, Sep 07, 2021, 4:55 AM UTC

ntSean wrote: post #45

exporectomy wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's interesting. It may have done the same with white people the same amount but nobody called the BBC to whine, or the BBC didn't care about that.

If it had tagged all humans in all photos as primates; this wouldn't be newsworthy- but it didn’t do that. It only tagged black people. Which if you can empathise with others, is understandably offensive.

> but it didn’t do that. It only tagged black people

Do you have a source for that? I couldn't find this in the article but maybe I missed it.

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

#239

Post by mastazi » Tue, Sep 07, 2021, 4:56 AM UTC

ceejayoz wrote: post #121

mastazi wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> and when it labels both black and white people Unfortunately the article doesn't provide any details on whether that was the case or not. I'm finding it very difficult to form an opinion about this specific issue without having more info.

You think Facebook wouldn’t be shouting that from the rooftops if it were so?

Probably they would. If we had a more thorough source we would know for sure.

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

#240

Post by maweki » Tue, Sep 07, 2021, 4:57 AM UTC

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.

And while that is probably true for most of us and gorilla faces, even those midwesterners would easily distinguish an Asian person from a Gorilla.

It's true that we're good at recognizing faces (even where there are none), and distinguishing on a basic level (type of animal) but specific faces are mostly cultural.