4 ms·
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, overworke
by 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 agoAlso 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 agoI 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 agoI'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 agoI 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 agoPoint 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 agoC'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.