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I found it curious that this Bot is really bad at recognizing apes: chimpanzees and gorillas specifically. I fed it a lot of the images from a Google image sear

by jnky 11y ago

I found it curious that this Bot is really bad at recognizing apes: chimpanzees and gorillas specifically. I fed it a lot of the images from a Google image search for these animals and more often than not it either doesn't recognize anything or considers them bears. I don't mean to offend, but I'm left wondering if the creators of image recognition services disincentivize their neural nets from recognizing something as an ape, gorilla or chimpanzee so as to avoid the same mistake Google made when it falsely recognized black people as gorillas [1]. [1] http://blogs.wsj.com/digits/2015/07/01/google-mistakenly-tags-black-people-as-gorillas-showing-limits-of-algorithms/ http://blogs.wsj.com/digits/2015/07/01/google-mistakenly-tag...

readams 11y ago
People in general look very much like gorillas. They are close cousins after all. Telling humans and other apes apart can't be very easy for a poor, overworked neural network.
- mc32 11y ago
  Also why are people offended by gorillas, or apes. Imagine being mislabeled as a bear or a giraffe, would people get as offended? What about bring identified as a parrot?
  - jnky 11y ago
    I get where you're coming from, but black people being compared to apes is kind of an age old racist trope, so it is understandable that people would be unhappy about it. Being mislabeled as a bear on the other hand does not generally carry the negative connotations as calling people apes, so I suspects that this is why CapitionBot is erring on this side of the classification.
    - mc32 11y ago
      I'm aware people may want to _use_ it as a racist tool --but I fail to understand that transformation. We're all apes[1] the offender and the target/victim. So more than anything, it shows ignorance by the victimizer/bigot. I suppose it's like calling someone a Neanderthal, but with racial implications. Interestingly, we're learning Neanderthals were not as cognitively lacking as perhaps some supposed. It's like saying, hey, you are hairy... Right, we're all hairy (bald or not) with very few exceptions. It's a weird thing. [1] In Indonesian lang. people and apes share the "orang" root. Oran, orangutan, orangnakal, etc.
      - jnky 11y ago
        I don't think there is as much to understand as you make it out to be. People feel insulted when called apes, because it is frequently used as an insult. It may well be taxonomically correct to say that humans as well as apes are primates and members of the Hominidae family, but that doesn't make it any less insulting. Just because something is technically correct doesn't mean it isn't dehumanizing and suitable as an insult. I'm sure nobody would like to be called a sack of meat either.
        mc32 11y ago
        Point taken. Still, this is a machine that's doing the labelling, and one would have to think someone purposely programmed it to do that, rather than the engineers lacking foresight to see a possible misrecognition.
  - nols 11y ago
    C'mon, there's a long history of calling black people monkeys or apes as a way to remove their humanity. It's willful ignorance to ignore that history.
deleted 11y ago
[deleted]
outside1234 11y ago
Short answer: Yes, especially after Tay.
colllectorof 11y ago
Reading the blog post and the Twitter thread. Wow. 10 years ago it would have been seen as a comical blunder of a stupid AI. Something to be fixed for sure, but not a Serious Social Issue by any means. Nowadays, it apparently warrants several follow-up articles in the mainstream media, "social" commentary and 3,309 retweets. From the blog post: “The bias of the Internet reflects the bias of society,” she said. In some cases - yes, but this one seems more like society deliberately projecting human motivations onto a primitive algorithm and jumping to conclusions about what its errors "really" mean. - For people who disagree, here is a scenario your might want to consider. Imagine that you built an image tagging service. Imagine that someone found a glitch in your service that they consider offensive. Imagine them tweeting about it (before or instead of contacting you directly) and getting a similar kind of reaction, complete with extensive social commentary and media coverage. Nice, big crowd of people using your company and your service as a convenient example of things-that-are-wrong-with-our-society. How would you feel in that case?
- jnky 11y ago
  I couldn't agree more. I'm all for not discriminating people, but on the other hand I firmly believe that technical progress should not be second to people's feelings.
- taneq 11y ago
  The issue here is that race relations in the U.S. are so convoluted and have so much history that it's literally impossible to tell what would be considered "racist" without a broad understanding of the culture and a comprehensive list of past racial slurs and grievances. Witness the KFC ad (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZaIhf41ctkM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZaIhf41ctkM) which was broadly labeled as "racist", despite the fact that the 'black people love fried chicken' stereotype is (as far as I know) only a U.S. construction.
  - jnky 11y ago
    > The issue here is that race relations in the U.S. are so convoluted and have so much history that it's literally impossible to tell what would be considered "racist" without a broad understanding of the culture and a comprehensive list of past racial slurs and grievances. I understand, but isn't the logical conclusion that one cannot make a piece of technology (like an image caption bot) that is unaware of, for instance, such complex racial relations? And if so, should technological progress really be hampered by people's sense of outrage, even in the absence of malicious intent?

by jnky 11y ago

readams 11y ago

People in general look very much like gorillas. They are close cousins after all. Telling humans and other apes apart can't be very easy for a poor, overworked neural network.

mc32 11y ago
Also why are people offended by gorillas, or apes. Imagine being mislabeled as a bear or a giraffe, would people get as offended? What about bring identified as a parrot?
- jnky 11y ago
  I get where you're coming from, but black people being compared to apes is kind of an age old racist trope, so it is understandable that people would be unhappy about it. Being mislabeled as a bear on the other hand does not generally carry the negative connotations as calling people apes, so I suspects that this is why CapitionBot is erring on this side of the classification.
  - mc32 11y ago
    I'm aware people may want to _use_ it as a racist tool --but I fail to understand that transformation. We're all apes[1] the offender and the target/victim. So more than anything, it shows ignorance by the victimizer/bigot. I suppose it's like calling someone a Neanderthal, but with racial implications. Interestingly, we're learning Neanderthals were not as cognitively lacking as perhaps some supposed. It's like saying, hey, you are hairy... Right, we're all hairy (bald or not) with very few exceptions. It's a weird thing. [1] In Indonesian lang. people and apes share the "orang" root. Oran, orangutan, orangnakal, etc.
    - jnky 11y ago
      I don't think there is as much to understand as you make it out to be. People feel insulted when called apes, because it is frequently used as an insult. It may well be taxonomically correct to say that humans as well as apes are primates and members of the Hominidae family, but that doesn't make it any less insulting. Just because something is technically correct doesn't mean it isn't dehumanizing and suitable as an insult. I'm sure nobody would like to be called a sack of meat either.
      - mc32 11y ago
        Point taken. Still, this is a machine that's doing the labelling, and one would have to think someone purposely programmed it to do that, rather than the engineers lacking foresight to see a possible misrecognition.
- nols 11y ago
  C'mon, there's a long history of calling black people monkeys or apes as a way to remove their humanity. It's willful ignorance to ignore that history.

deleted 11y ago

[deleted]

outside1234 11y ago

Short answer: Yes, especially after Tay.

colllectorof 11y ago

Reading the blog post and the Twitter thread. Wow. 10 years ago it would have been seen as a comical blunder of a stupid AI. Something to be fixed for sure, but not a Serious Social Issue by any means. Nowadays, it apparently warrants several follow-up articles in the mainstream media, "social" commentary and 3,309 retweets. From the blog post: “The bias of the Internet reflects the bias of society,” she said. In some cases - yes, but this one seems more like society deliberately projecting human motivations onto a primitive algorithm and jumping to conclusions about what its errors "really" mean. - For people who disagree, here is a scenario your might want to consider. Imagine that you built an image tagging service. Imagine that someone found a glitch in your service that they consider offensive. Imagine them tweeting about it (before or instead of contacting you directly) and getting a similar kind of reaction, complete with extensive social commentary and media coverage. Nice, big crowd of people using your company and your service as a convenient example of things-that-are-wrong-with-our-society. How would you feel in that case?

jnky 11y ago
I couldn't agree more. I'm all for not discriminating people, but on the other hand I firmly believe that technical progress should not be second to people's feelings.
taneq 11y ago
The issue here is that race relations in the U.S. are so convoluted and have so much history that it's literally impossible to tell what would be considered "racist" without a broad understanding of the culture and a comprehensive list of past racial slurs and grievances. Witness the KFC ad (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZaIhf41ctkM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZaIhf41ctkM) which was broadly labeled as "racist", despite the fact that the 'black people love fried chicken' stereotype is (as far as I know) only a U.S. construction.
- jnky 11y ago
  > The issue here is that race relations in the U.S. are so convoluted and have so much history that it's literally impossible to tell what would be considered "racist" without a broad understanding of the culture and a comprehensive list of past racial slurs and grievances. I understand, but isn't the logical conclusion that one cannot make a piece of technology (like an image caption bot) that is unaware of, for instance, such complex racial relations? And if so, should technological progress really be hampered by people's sense of outrage, even in the absence of malicious intent?