Video of Black Man Labeled Primate, Facebook Apologizes

 


Facebook apologized after its AI (artificial intelligence) technology failed to recognize the type of video of a black man fighting with a black policeman. The video was labeled 'about primates'.

The label appears after the user has finished watching the video. Users received questions whether they wanted to 'continue to see videos about Primates' and this naturally irritated the public.


"This is clearly an unacceptable error and we disabled the entire topic recommendation feature as soon as we realized this was happening so we could investigate the cause and prevent this from happening again," Facebook spokesperson Dani Lever said in a statement to USA Today as seen Monday ( 6/9/2021).




"As we've said, we've made improvements to our AI, we know it's not perfect and we have more progress to be made. We apologize to anyone who may have seen this offensive recommendation."


For information, this is not the first time a technology company has come under fire for racial bias that occurs in its automated systems. In 2015, Google apologized after its photo app mistakenly identified black people as gorillas.


A year later, Microsoft's Tay AI chatbot unexpectedly hurled racial slurs and had to be taken offline. Other racial biases creeping into tech products also include the issue of skin-lightening Instagram filters or fetishing ethnic features and Snapchat filters that use black faces or caricatures of Asians.

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