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As a software engineer I understand these sort of bugs. A product manager in China asks: can we find a way to prevent people commenting on these videos with co
by barbegal 6y ago
As a software engineer I understand these sort of bugs.
A product manager in China asks: can we find a way to prevent people commenting on these videos with comments that contain the word 共匪. Engineer goes away and comes up with a plan to train an AI model to detect these comments. He present's this solution to his manager who informs him that the solution needs to be in place next week, there is no time to gather the required training data and annotate it. There is also no budget for this project.
So the engineer goes off to find a new plan and finds that Google already has a basic spam comment detector which uses simple heuristics to delete comments. He adds a new rule to the detector. Mark as spam if it contains the "共匪" sub-string.
His boss is now happy, it gets sent to a test team in China who confirm that commenting with the word 共匪 on one of the videos results in the comment being deleted. Test passed job done, ticket closed. At no point does this get escalated or reviewed by anyone properly.
And if you don't believe this can happen anywhere, see the Scunthorpe problem https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scunthorpe_problem https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scunthorpe_problem
- jpxw 6y agoIf you’re right, Google will stop removing these comments now that it has gotten publicity (although personally I heard about it ~a week ago) and apologise. I won’t be holding my breath. Edit: I’ve just noticed the Google support claim here was posted in late 2019. It’s somewhat hard to believe that this has just flown under Google’s radar.
- codegladiator 6y ago> He adds a new rule to the detector. Mark as spam if it contains the "共匪" sub-string But they have the best people of the industry who are highly paid for their engineering and problem solving skills. Isn't this the kind of problem they are supposed to solve ? > As a software engineer I understand these sort of bugs. As a software engineer I would have understood this sort of bug if it was some startup.
- envy2 6y agoExcept YouTube is blocked in China, so no one really should be trying to solve this to begin with...
- natestemen 6y agopeople read/write chinese outside of China though...
- fermienrico 6y agoWhy do we have to kowtow to them or even the Chinese government? If someone says "Fuck the US government", we allow that on Youtube, don't we?
- st1ck 6y agoI'd assume most of Chinese speakers in Taiwan, Hong Kong, Malaysia etc. would not be triggered by "communist bandits".
- seanmcdirmid 6y agoBut outside of the jurisdiction of mainland China. People from Taiwan and Hong Kong really hate it when mainland censorship are imposed on them.