4 ms·
The point is to avoid false positives for autogenerated captions, since false positives are what's damaging about allowing slurs in autogenerated captions, not
by filoleg 6y ago
The point is to avoid false positives for autogenerated captions, since false positives are what's damaging about allowing slurs in autogenerated captions, not slurs in captions in general.
For example, imagine there is a video where someone says a slur and the system transcribes that slur without censoring. If you detected it correctly (true positive), then everything is fine. However, if there was no slur and you detected it as a slur (false positive), it is a big problem. Imagine watching some video talking about perfume, the narrator says something like "the smell lingers for a while", and the transcription code thinks it got the n-word instead of "lingers". It would be disastrous.
Now imagine there is a censoring system in place for slurs. What it does, it simply gets rid of false positives at the root by completely removing them from the list of possible words to autogenerate, thus guaranteeing that situations like the one I brought up above could never happen. So now, if it is a true positive that nets a slur word, it just gets rid of that word. PR disaster avoided.
"Censorship", in this case, is just a very unfortunate side-effect of solving that problem I described above. As long as they don't censor those words in manually created captions, I am totally ok with it, because then the burden of a false positive is on the person who wrote the captions. I.e., if google doesn't ban "true positive slur" scenarios in manually generated captions, imo it is a reasonable and understandable compromise.
- scrollaway 6y agoCensoring (as in bleeping) doesn't prevent the damage. It's like a phone autocorrecting "duck" to "f*ck". Putting a star there doesn't undo the "damage" of getting it wrong. Autocorrects solve this by omitting the word from their dictionary altogether, so if a false positive happens it's from duck to luck, not duck to something censored.
- derefr 6y agoIf the censorship of text is complete (i.e. just the text "[censored]" instead of any word at all), then in a false-positive scenario, the "[censored]" will appear entirely out-of-context (since it wasn't the right word to begin with), so there'll be no way, just by reading the resulting text, to intuitively figure out what word the system thought it had recognized.
- scrollaway 6y ago"[censored]" standalone is no better, because of the implication. If you want to go that route, pick something else. Voice: "Because lucky you, that's why" Caption 2: "Because f*ck you, that's why" Caption 3: "Because [censored] you, that's why" Caption 4: "Because [unintelligible] you, that's why" You tell me, which one of these failure modes is better?
- filoleg 6y agoThe best failure mode is none of those. Using your example, the best one is the one that finds the closest approximate word that isn't a slur. That would solve both problems at once, because there is a really strong chance that the first closest guess that isn't a slur is the actual correct word that was said there. And in case it picks an incorrect word, it would have picked it either way and it would have been just as wrong. So if the voice said "Because lucky you, that's why", in case youtube autotranscript thinks it was "fuck" and not "lucky", it would either default to "lucky" (which is good) or another closest non-slur word like "mucky" or "rocky". And, in my opinion, this is way better than putting [censored] or any other workaround out of those you mentioned, because all of them have zero chance to end up as the correct word (in case the slur was detected incorrectly), while with the approach I described, it is very possible.
- scrollaway 6y agoI feel like we're arguing for the same thing.
- mantap 6y agoI don't think deaf users would agree with you. Because they are going to be trying to understand if they actually said lucky rather than fuck. Better to choose the best match, and fuck the prudes.
- derefr 6y agoThe false-positive case is more like, e.g. "[censored] the chicken crossed the road." There's no slur/curse that actually makes sense in that position, according to the rules of the English language, so there's no implication.
- 9HZZRfNlpR 6y agoWhy would it be disastrous? What is wrong with you Americans? Your pop culture is full of the n word and other slurs, clearly no one trying to get rid of it. So you heart and understand it's q mistake and just move on.
- dang 6y agoPlease don't take HN threads into nationalistic flamewar, regardless of which country you're for or against. It's definitely not what we want here. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html