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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'

#251

Post by hdjjhhvvhga »

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.

But what would you do if you were them? You solved 95% of the problem, you are left with 5% that are extremely hard. Would you throw a large amount of resources to solve that? And, given that you basically deal with probabilities and that the system will never work 100% anyway, and that even one mistake of that kind will cause uproar - is there any other feasible solution?

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

#253

Post by e_proxus »

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…

Given the complexity of the solutions employed in this space and the task we’re trying to get them to solve (or perhaps, the solutions we’re looking for problems to) I’m not that surprised.

Taken to the extreme, AI code is essentially something like:

  add(M, N) {
    return M + N + rand();
  }
In addition, being tested with a (in relation to the complete set) very small set of input data.

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

#254

Post by raxxorrax »

strken wrote: post #226
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…

The short answer is that tech companies run diversity programs for three reasons: they believe in righting wrongs, they don't want to be sued for biased hiring practices, and they don't want bad PR. All three require under-represented minorities. Turning it back on you, what should the point of a diversity program be? What's meant to be achieved outside those three goals?

Actually listening to minorities instead of summoning some kind of sick quota for different ethnicities. Racists are in stark decline and it didn't even take a diversity program or a change in language rules.

The companies are then righting the wrongs on the shoulders of innocents, that most likely never were racists to begin with. In short, just committing to another mistake.

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

#255

Post by npteljes »

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"

What I don't get is that people seriously think that FB/Google don't test with images of black people? Especially after one of such mislabeling scandal happened already? Very highly doubtful.

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

#256

Post by urthor »

belltaco wrote: post #228
ummonk wrote: post #154

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are you saying an ML system should never be released if it doesn’t have perfect accuracy?

Tagging black people as monkeys is not a showstopper bug? If so it makes them look even worse than if it was an overlooked bug.

Quite honestly, in a team that's stressed and run down to the line, checking for that particular classification in a model that has hundreds of classification targets can be really tricky.

Say you have 1000 classification targets. You have to produce a model that checks, for each target, the odds of it being classified as one of other 999.

You have to check, specifically, for "adult male as primate" out of a million potential combinations. And apply secondary business rules or optimizations to prevent that classifications.

So yes it's possible, but it's not cheap, simple or easy.

Facebook just decided to shove the model out the door and not worry about the consequences.

Quality engineering work, costs money and time. Facebook didn't spend it.

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

#257

Post by throwthere »

overgard wrote: post #74
throwthere wrote: post #16

Maybe the algo or the training set or something else was racist, maybe it wasn't. But if you code something that labels people slurs, you've messed something up. Like, you need to be 99.999999% sure you're not throwing out slurs or your whole project is failing spectacularly. And then you have to apologize to the 0.0000001% , which is still probably like 10 people if half the planet uses your site. How do you get the…

This isn't the kind of slur that you can just run a dictionary search for. There are totally valid contexts to tag a gorilla in a picture if it contains gorillas. I'm sure there are other words it could also mistakenly classify with that might be insulting on accident but arent slurs (maybe tagging an athlete as a statue, for instance, like "that quarterback is a statue in the pocket"). This tech isn't perfect so you…

Oh boy. People who know basic ML think "Oh, it was unintentional, just a basic misclassification, it happens." Guess what? You're still calling people slurs on your website, even if you did it accidentally.

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

#258

Post by ceejayoz »

silisili wrote: post #153
ceejayoz wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We are, and when it labels both black and white people that, perhaps we can consider that a fair point.

Can we be certain that it didn't label any white people this way? I feel like if it did, they likely wouldn't care. This isn't a comment about whether or not the problem is racist, or what it means, which I care not to discuss. Remember that nearly every cartoonist compared GWB to a chimp. In fairness, he kinda resembled one. Doing so to Obama would have been immediately flagged as racist. I don't need a history less…

> Can we be certain that it didn't label any white people this way?

I would expect their reps would be shouting this loudly if it were the case.

> Remember that nearly every cartoonist compared GWB to a chimp. In fairness, he kinda resembled one. Doing so to Obama would have been immediately flagged as racist.

Sure, because context and history both matter.

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

#259

Post by tartoran »

q-rews wrote: post #250
tartoran wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don’t think any algo should be in the business of labeling any people period. What you call sensitive is offensive to others as much as you being labeled stupid by the look of your face. It is wrong in your case and it is also wrong in the cases you perceive as sensitive. I actually find it quite insensitive of you to dictate what others should feel based on your experience. And selfish too

> I don’t think any algo should be in the business of labeling any people period. You’re proving my point. What you’re saying is that we should stop any algo from categorizing anything just to avoid a 0.00001% of hurting someone’s feelings. People like you are going to bring back the dark ages. Go back to Twitter. Can’t we just treat these incidents as bugs and fix them instead of just fueling the outrage machine?

I'm not proving any point of yours as you seem to be set on your arguments without reading what I say: I'm talking about labeling people here not just anything in general.
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