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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'

#31

Post by tartoran »

mycodesucks wrote: post #3

I mean... It's not wrong, we're all primates.

How would you feel if you’d be labeled supremacist (only if your skin complexion was white)? After all the human species is the supreme species... Oh well I guess that wouldn’t bother you and you’d take it as a compliment. Now imagine the reverse of a compliment, to be given one of the labels that has been used again and again to belittle you, to make you feel inferior (only to make others feel above you), a label which you’d get stamped on regardless of any of your acomplishments, qualities, virtues and so on.

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

#32

Post by exporectomy »

smoldesu wrote: post #6

Who takes the fall when an AI screws up? If you shine enough light on it, apparently the brand does. If a human were to do this, the company would immediately fire the employee and cut all ties with them. But as the article points out, 'fixing' an AI mistake isn't really a fix at all: > [Google] said it was "appalled and genuinely sorry", though its fix, Wired reported in 2018, was simply to censor photo searches and…

If a human did it with intent to offend, they would. But if a black person genuinely looked like a primate to human eyes, that would be pretty shitty to fire the poor worker who had no way of knowing. Here, the AI isn't trying to offend so maybe there should be no consequences and people should stop demanding severe punishment for minor accidental insults.

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

#33

Post by q-rews »

I feel that 0-failure-rate expectations from technology will keep us from progressing as a species.

Facebook disabled Thai-to-English translation back in April because it translated the queen as “slut” and it’s been disabled since.

Maybe we should learn to accept non-fatal errors from applications instead of forcing things to stop entirely.

I find it ridiculous that my Photos app suggests I change monkey to “lemur” while I have plenty of photos of monkeys and zero of lemurs.

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

#34

Post by ntSean »

mastazi wrote: post #20
exporectomy wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's not how language works. We're also all animals but not animals at the same time. Context and culture affect the meaning of words.

Parent's point is not irrelevant though, did the AI label only people of one specific racial background as primates? The article doesn't really provide any details as it's only a few lines long. The word "primate" in itself is not a slur but it can be used as a slur, as you said, depending on the context, however not much context was given in the article.

There was a discussion of this in a sibling thread with more context.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28416909

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

#35

Post by mastazi »

ceejayoz wrote: post #25
mycodesucks wrote: post #3

I mean... It's not wrong, we're all primates.

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

> 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.

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

#36

Post by sluggosaurus »

exporectomy wrote: post #12
scotty79 wrote: post #5

Is that a result of a skewed training set or are people really hard to tell apart from gorillas if there are no obvious tells like large difference in brightness of different areas of the face?

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

> Gorillas have black and human-like faces.

Chimpanzees often have 'white' and human-life faces. Are these algorithms ever classifying white people as chimpanzees?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chimpanzee#/media/File:Chimpan...

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

#37

Post by 0x426577617265 »

exporectomy wrote: post #12
scotty79 wrote: post #5

Is that a result of a skewed training set or are people really hard to tell apart from gorillas if there are no obvious tells like large difference in brightness of different areas of the face?

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

I’m fairly certain if you showed pictures of both groups to a toddler they’d be able to sort them correctly. It’s really not hard for a human to tell the difference. Which tells me that FB’s AI isn’t really that great.

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

#39

Post by pugets »

exporectomy wrote: post #9
mycodesucks wrote: post #3

I mean... It's not wrong, we're all primates.

That's not how language works. We're also all animals but not animals at the same time. Context and culture affect the meaning of words.

I read the comment in a different way: We are all literally primates. Humans and apes share a lot of physical characteristics. It's not odd that an AI would confuse humans with primates, it's just unfortunate.

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

#40

Post by MattGaiser »

scotty79 wrote: post #5

Is that a result of a skewed training set or are people really hard to tell apart from gorillas if there are no obvious tells like large difference in brightness of different areas of the face?

I would be interested to know if young children would do much better in many cases.

When I was quite young, I referred to some firefighters as robots.

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