Earlier quoted context omitted.
Intentional or not, the outcome is all that matters. In every aspect of your life
I don't know if this is necessarily true. We have separate charges for murder and manslaughter for example.
[deleted]
Facebook apology as AI labels black men 'primates'
71–80 of 291 posts
Re: Facebook apology as AI labels black men 'primates'
#72nothing important in the world should RELY on a AI/nn/ml.
Re: Facebook apology as AI labels black men 'primates'
#73Re: Facebook apology as AI labels black men 'primates'
#74Maybe 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 either need a human editor or you have to learn to live with mistakes. IMO the fact that this was unintentional and an AI mistake makes me think the outrage is more performative than genuine.
Re: Facebook apology as AI labels black men 'primates'
#75This 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:/…
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.
Re: Facebook apology as AI labels black men 'primates'
#76Re: Facebook apology as AI labels black men 'primates'
#77Earlier quoted context omitted.
Intentional or not, the outcome is all that matters. In every aspect of your life
Speak for yourself. Intent is one of the key factors in crime investigations. Even in 'every aspect of life', intent plays a critical role in greasing the society's abrasion. It helps us understand each other better. Did you accidentally bumped me or did you try to push me out of the bus?
Intent can and will influence the outcome.
Does not change anything about my original statement.
The end outcome of “oops I bumped into you” is basically nothing. The end outcome of an intentional shove is quite different (maybe lack of trust develops, etc)
The end outcome of punching someone in the face while drunk and saying “hey brah I didn’t mean to” is still gonna feel shitty no matter the intent
Re: Facebook apology as AI labels black men 'primates'
#78Earlier quoted context omitted.
Got a source for that?
While I don't have a source, it seems clear that with sufficient training data they could do better at avoiding this mistake. This should not be hard.
Perfect accuracy in image classification is an unsolved problem. So yea, it's hard.
Re: Facebook apology as AI labels black men 'primates'
#79Re: Facebook apology as AI labels black men 'primates'
#80I don't really think the world needs AI right now. One can argue that the AI is making an innocent mistake and that calling an AI or ML (or it's improper training, however that works) "racist" is overblown rhetoric as people are here, but I think all of that aschews the actual issue. The problem is that AI and ML are primarily used for decision making, like in recommendation engines. These little gadgets that provide recommendations may be fairly low-stakes, but are theoretically proof-of-concepts for future applications like policing, fighting terrorism, or human trafficking. If you get it wrong there, the consequences are devastating. If people don't raise the flag about how wildly wrong the AI is now, then there will inevitably be a false confidence to use it for the aforementioned applications (and there are plenty of examples of how this has already happened).