(Belgium) Facebook has apologized after the networking site’s artificial intelligence (AI) technology mislabeled a video featuring black men arguing with white police officers and civilians as “about primates.”
Social media users who had watched the video were asked afterwards if they wanted to “continue to see videos about primates.” The video was published by the Daily Mail. “This was clearly an unacceptable mistake,” Facebook spokesman Dani Lever said in a statement to USA Today. “We disabled the topic recommend feature as soon as we became aware so we can investigate the cause and prevent this from happening again.” “While we’ve made improvements to our AI, we know it’s not perfect and needs improvement. We apologize to anyone who saw these offensive recommendations.” The incident is the latest in a series of racial blunders online, caused by what appears to be racial bias in automated systems. According to recent studies, facial recognition technology can be biased towards people of color and typically have more difficulty identifying them. It has led to incidents where black people have been discriminated against or arrested because of a computer error. (Belgium)
Social media users who had watched the video were asked afterwards if they wanted to “continue to see videos about primates.” The video was published by the Daily Mail. “This was clearly an unacceptable mistake,” Facebook spokesman Dani Lever said in a statement to USA Today. “We disabled the topic recommend feature as soon as we became aware so we can investigate the cause and prevent this from happening again.” “While we’ve made improvements to our AI, we know it’s not perfect and needs improvement. We apologize to anyone who saw these offensive recommendations.” The incident is the latest in a series of racial blunders online, caused by what appears to be racial bias in automated systems. According to recent studies, facial recognition technology can be biased towards people of color and typically have more difficulty identifying them. It has led to incidents where black people have been discriminated against or arrested because of a computer error. (Belgium)
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