Facebook Apologizes After A.I. Puts ‘Primates’ Label on Video of Black Men

Ms. Groves said the prompt was “horrifying and egregious.”

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.”

Google, Amazon and other technology companies have been under scrutiny for years for biases within their artificial intelligence systems, particularly around issues of race. Studies have shown that facial recognition technology is biased against people of color and has more trouble identifying them, leading to incidents where Black people have been discriminated against or arrested because of computer error.

In one example in 2015, Google Photos mistakenly labeled pictures of Black people as “gorillas,” for which the search giant said it was “genuinely sorry” and would work to fix the issue immediately. More than two years later, Wired found that Google’s solution was to censor the word “gorilla” from searches, while also blocking “chimp,” “chimpanzee,” and “monkey.”

Facebook has one of the world’s largest repositories of user-uploaded images on which to train its facial- and object-recognition algorithms. The company, which tailors content to users based on their past browsing and viewing habits, sometimes asks people if they would like to continue seeing posts under related categories. It was unclear whether messages like the “primates” one were widespread.

Article source: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/09/03/technology/facebook-ai-race-primates.html