Facebook would certainly have liked to have been spared this shitstorm. The social network has made a real faux pas of itself with its legendary AI. After all, it equated black people with apes.
“Clearly unacceptable mistake”
The origin of the outcry lies in a video that featured several people with dark skin. After this was played, Facebook asked the user if they still wanted to see “videos about primates.” Accordingly, the algorithm simply confused black people with monkeys. Facebook itself rightly calls this faux pas a “clearly unacceptable mistake.” The video was not posted by any conventional user, which is probably why the outcry occurred in the first place. Rather, the creator is the British tabloid magazine Daily Mail.
The title of the video was “White man calls police over black men at port” and was viewed by many Facebook users. All of them were asked whether they would like to see a sequel with “videos about primates”. The case came to public attention through another journalistic veteran – the New York Times. In order to avoid further mistakes of this kind, the company immediately revised the corresponding algorithm. Further, a spokeswoman for Facebook apologized, saying:
“We apologize to anyone who has seen these offending recommendations.”
AI is not free of errors
We live in a time when artificial intelligence is increasingly credited with perfection. In particular, the algorithms of IT giants such as Facebook or Google are said to be getting better and better with the help of state-of-the-art machine learning. However, the case described above makes it clear that errors can still occur even with modern algorithms. In this case, it was Facebook’s facial recognition software, which is already highly controversial, that made a mistake. Civil rights activists have been pointing out possible problems with the algorithm for quite some time.
