Facebook’s A.I. Labeled the Video of Black Men as Content About Primates
Facebook calls it unacceptable.
Elon Musk:“ With artificial intelligence, we are summoning the demon.” But before the demon gets here, AI is showing its racial and gender bias.
In a report by The New York Times, a video that Facebook users watched from the Daily Mail of black men got a prompt from the social media giant, the message goes —
“keep seeing videos about Primates?”
Shortly after that, the company apologized and planned to investigate and disable the artificial intelligence-powered feature that pushed the message.
On Friday, Facebook apologized for what it called —
“an unacceptable error”
The video, dated June 27, 2020, was by The Daily Mail and featured clips of Black men in altercations with white civilians and police officers. It had no connection to monkeys or primates.
Facebook can’t keep on saying it is sorry.
Dani Lever, a Facebook spokeswoman, said in a statement: “As we have said, while we have made improvements to our A.I., we know it’s not perfect, and we have more progress to make. We apologize to anyone who may have seen these offensive recommendations.”
This isn't the first time that it happened. Years ago, Google misidentified black men as gorillas.
In the past, when the technology isn’t as advanced as it is now, Data sets can be manipulated and can fall victim to our human biases, a case in point when Google mistakenly labeled black people as gorillas.
This shows that Artificial Intelligence is heavily dependent on data sets that are susceptible to racial bias and profiling.
What computers learn are from real people, machine learning is dependent on data fed by real people, and it is not surprising for a company like Facebook to continue to have these kinds of incidences of bad racial profiling on its social media platform as it has in the past failed to stop posts that trigger racial bigotry.
In April, the US Federal Trade Commission warned that AI tools that have demonstrated “troubling” racial and gender biases may be in violation of consumer protection laws if they’re used decision-making for credit, housing or employment. “Hold yourself accountable — or be ready for the FTC to do it for you,” FTC privacy attorney Elisa Jillson wrote in a post on the agency’s website.