27 ms·

“ The researchers now suggest that social-media platforms should incorporate chess language in their algorithms to avoid future incidents like this.” Or maybe

“ The researchers now suggest that social-media platforms should incorporate chess language in their algorithms to avoid future incidents like this.” Or maybe don’t automate banning YouTube channels via nebulous black boxes? Or can advertisers stop being afraid of anything and everything?

bartread 6y ago
Bear in mind what we have here is an example of the cutting edge of AI in its real world use. It doesn't exactly inspire faith in AI if some of the best is this thick when it comes to making decisions that would be incredibly basic for a human of even below average intelligence.
- das4119 6y ago
  Frankly the whole thing stinks. On the whim of an unaccountable AI basically anything can happen. We need laws around this sooner rather than later. AIs are getting more powerful but less responsible. Just don't have an argument about a book or you could end up on death row. Gordon Dickson wrote a short story about this https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computers_Don%27t_Argue https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computers_Don%27t_Argue
  - Aerroon 6y ago
    Why do we need laws around this? We need to hold the people accountable that put this into production and/or produced it. People should be able to build bad AI, but if that causes poor real world outcomes, then the people that okay'd its use need to take responsibility. "An AI erroneously banned the channel," shouldn't get any more leeway than "A support staff member banned the channel."
    - texasbigdata 6y ago
      Because the inner bias that humans have that might lead to similar exclusion is implicitly hidden and somehow excused and the machines are held to a higher standard, for some reason.
    - CydeWeys 6y ago
      > "An AI erroneously banned the channel," shouldn't get any more leeway than "A support staff member banned the channel. What would curtail the leeway then? Other than losing public trust in the product for this happening repeatedly anyway?
    - notriddle 6y ago
      Apple uses 100% human labor for their app reviews. They get about as much accountability as Google does. Personally, I think the AI is a total red herring.
    - amirkdv 6y ago
      > Why do we need laws around this? We need to hold the people accountable [...] [T]he people that okay'd its use need to take responsibility. Genuinely asking: what do you think profitable companies would do to their ML engineers over a product issue like this if there was no law under which they would be sued? I think accountability without an enforcement mechanism is just a wishful suggestion.
      - Aerroon 6y ago
        >what do you think profitable companies would do to their ML engineers over a product issue like this if there was no law under which they would be sued? Nothing. Maybe a reprimand at best, because the consequences of this are fairly minor. If a store erroneously bans you and them unbans you and says that there was a mixup with their policy, then what do you think should be the consequences to the store? If it's effectively a monopoly then I can see there being problems, but if it's just a random store then that doesn't really matter.
  - SilverRed 6y ago
    Youtube is in between a rock and a hard place as well as all user generated content sites. Either they automate removing content and end up removing some of the good with the mountains of bad, or they do it manually which costs a fortune and is too slow. The local news is still ridiculing Facebook because they left the stream up for the NZ shooting for hours and their stated reason "No one watching the video had reported it". Well what do we want facebook to do? Hire thousands of people to watch every single livestream live? IMO we should all move to some kind of self hosting where there is no central mega corp that takes responsibility for the content. You host your own content and you stand behind it legally. As long as its legal content, you have no risk of being shut down.
    - curlypaul924 6y ago
      > Either they automate removing content and end up removing some of the good with the mountains of bad, or they do it manually which costs a fortune and is too slow. I think this is a false dichotomy; they could automate flagging for human review instead. This would address the cost though not the speed. Content awaiting review could be disabled, or it could be disabled only if it is deemed sufficiently egregious.
      - SilverRed 6y ago
        >they could automate flagging for human review instead. I'm not sure this would save them in many cases. Most of the abusive content on facebook is not easily identifiable. I don't think the current AI systems are up to the task. They may be able to identify a human and a dog are in the video but not tell the difference between petting the dog or punching it. Similarly they likely can not tell the difference between someone at a shooting range or committing a mass shooting. Just like it is too much to expect police to stop all crime before it happens, I think it is too much to expect platforms to remove violating content before it is reported.
- pishpash 6y ago
  Are you sure a human, never mind one of below average intelligence, gets this? We have people right now in Silicon Valley calling for renaming CS words because they sound racist to them.
  - Barrin92 6y ago
    of course a human might screw up but OPs general point is right. The AI doesn't even know what 'racism' is. It doesn't know what 'chess' is. It can't do context and it doesn't understand meaning, it just correlates audio signal. That this often looks like intelligence doesn't change the fact that it's incredibly far away from the real thing.
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
throwawayboise 6y ago
Your comment has been moderated for racist language ("black boxes").
- lwouis 6y ago
  You kid but i've received 2 pull-requests on my open-source project, which only goal was to replace "Blacklist" with "Blocklist" in the app preferences. I don't receive many PRs. This is a real trend.
  - jaimex2 6y ago
    I just block people from the project who submit PRs like that.
  - whatshisface 6y ago
    Funny thing is, since nobody ever submits PRs to change it in the opposite direction, even one person going around on GitHub would be virtually guaranteed to eventually change all of them.
    - reaperducer 6y ago
      even one person going around on GitHub would be virtually guaranteed to eventually change all of them It only took one complaint from someone in Canada to get Dire Straits' "Money for Nothing" cut in half on SiriusXM for an entire continent. (Though you can still hear the full version on the deep tracks channel).)
      - metalliqaz 6y ago
        they cut it in half rather than just bleep the "F" word?
        reaperducer 6y ago
        Yep. Dropped the entire verse and a chorus.
teh_klev 6y ago
> nebulous black boxes Probably a nitpick, I think you mean "opaque black boxes", you can see things through a nebula.
- trynton 6y ago
  @teh_klev: >> nebulous black boxes > Probably a nitpick, I think you mean "opaque black boxes", you can see things through a nebula. Your comment has been modded into invisibility :[
- vlozko 6y ago
  > (of a concept or idea) unclear, vague, or ill-defined. The other definition of nebulous.
- andrewzah 6y ago
  No, I meant nebulous as in unclear, hazy, or undefined. Nobody knows what the YouTube algorithm is going to decide is inappropriate next. Their site’s wording is very vague and unclear as well. You have youtubers censoring swear words now, and people uploading footage from video games like TF2 have had issues before.
  - teh_klev 6y ago
    > Nobody knows what the YouTube algorithm is going to decide is inappropriate next. Then that is the very definition of "opaque", which is what YouTube want and aim for.
    - titzer 6y ago
      Do we really need to split hairs like this? The algorithms aren't completely opaque, as they have been trained on a set of representative inputs, and are continuously monitored. They are based on neural networks, presumably, with weights inspectable by the engineers deploying the model. So it is more "nebulous" and not completely opaque.
      - 6y ago
root_axis 6y ago
Or maybe stop expecting corporate ad delivery networks to care about anything other than delivering ads.
himinlomax 6y ago
Youtube doesn't need stupid black boxes to make stupid decisions; look at their recent banning of a satirical Pewdiepie music video, for allegedly encouraging harassment. (It was a joke aimed at a nursery rhyme channel, how do you harass a nursery rhyme channel?)
Tenoke 6y ago
When they don't incorporate quick banning they get piled on by a mob for letting this or that bad person on their platform. And it's near impossible to monitor all of Youtube just with content moderators.
- nostromo 6y ago
  > piled on by a mob That’s the perception - but usually it’s at most a few hundred busybodies on Twitter, out of Google’s billions of users. People just need to start ignoring these people. They are a tiny minority of people. (It just so happens that seemingly half of them are journalists at the nation’s biggest newspapers.)
  - Tenoke 6y ago
    I guess that's true but only until the NYT or whoever decides to join in as well.
    - jeofken 6y ago
      NYT in the end though, is just one big blog, owned by a group with their own interests. Only when their interests line up with those of Google and Facebooks owners would they work in tandem. The solution for those wanting unfettered culture in the Information Age, not beholden to big finance and big techs whims, remains free and distributed software, such as running your own blogs, peertube, etc
karmasimida 6y ago
> Or can advertisers stop being afraid of anything and everything? Maybe the advertisers are doing this on purpose? Deep down they know they would lose almost nothing by pulling from those platforms for a short period of time (the quality of online advertising has been in doubt for a long time), while pleasing the vocal minority. At the same time, by playing moves like this would absolutely bring Google/Youtube to their knees, making it clear who is paying the bill.
- deelowe 6y ago
  That's exactly it.
- spamizbad 6y ago
  Advertisers have always been extremely risk-adverse. If your ad (either it’s contents OR it’s placement) hurts the brand you’re in trouble. Notice how there’s tons of product placement in PG-13 movies, but far less in those rated R?
jimmaswell 6y ago
There are way too many videos for manual review and the relatively rare false positive (one high profile case every few months vs how many videos uploaded every day?) is worth the gain in efficiency. But there should certainly be a better manual review process once the AI messes up.
- AndrewUnmuted 6y ago
  Perhaps this is true - it's quite plausible that there are too many videos uploaded to YouTube for any manual review to scale in a cost-efficient manner. However to me this does not negate YouTube's good-faith responsibility to clarify what kind of product they are and what they intend to do with their service as the years go by. These mistakes are extremely costly and potentially offensive to the end user, no matter how rare they may be in daily practice. YouTube made very foolhardy decisions to encourage the ingestion of any and all video content from just about all kinds of people. This had the impact of normalizing video content production practices, giving AI-directed content moderation a false sense of success in its early days of deployment. As content has grown more complex and nuanced on these platforms, the AI systems deployed have miserably failed to accommodate these changes in the ecosystem. It's all in an (IMO) futile effort for YouTube to make good on their reckless company roadmap without specific people having to take personal responsibility for their blunder.
- jandrese 6y ago
  There are way more than one rare false positive per month. These cases are so frequent they usually aren’t even considered news anymore. A few months ago some creators tried to organize but I’ve not heard anything from that effort recently. Google isn’t a government, there isn’t much you can demand from them. They aren’t accountable to you.
dehrmann 6y ago
Setting this case aside because it's sloppy reporting based on what another classifier found, this is a hard problem. Youtube gets too many videos and comments for humans to manually review them. Flagging helps, and Google likely uses ML more complex than just text and classifier (who is commenting, is the post trending, patterns in comments, etc.) When things do reach manual review, remember that humans make mistakes, possibly more often than ML, this could be human error. You actually want the algorithm to be a black box so that people don't know that you can trick it by only commenting between 5pm and 8pm on an IP in the Netherlands from Chrome, and avoid using words like "cactus." The important part here is a transparent appeal process, not that ML is only pretty good at these problems.
- phone8675309 6y ago
  > When things do reach manual review I’ve yet to see a case of the hoi poloi get a manual review - you either are a well enough known YouTuber where they have humans dedicated to you, you know someone who works at YouTube and can intercede on your behalf, or you have to whip up a Twitter mob big enough that it hurts YouTube's image or stirs up people with contacts at YouTube. Even then, sometimes that doesn’t work - look at the Terraria dev. YouTube effectively has no manual review for 99.9% of people which is why its automated systems accuracy is so important.
  - rmrfrmrf 6y ago
    The press are the manual reviewers, and articles like these are merely examples of the escalation process.
  - dehrmann 6y ago
    Be careful not to confuse manual review with an appeal. When I say "manual review," I mean the classifier isn't sure, so a human double checked, or it was sent to a human to validate the classifier. You're right--appeals are hard to get--but we have no idea how much Youtube manually reviews content.
  - polishTar 6y ago
    It's a genuinely hard problem, but they do have appeal systems that creators can use that go to human reviewer queues for things like video removals and demonetization even though the first pass is done via automation, but don't think humans aren't immune from mistakes either. As of 2018 youtube had 10,000 manual reviewers (and I imagine it's significantly more than that today), but at their scale, that realistically won't go that far.
c3534l 6y ago
> Or can advertisers stop being afraid of anything and everything? They can't, because there were a number of high-profile media storms blaming companies for advertising on YouTube when some of the content was distasteful by chance (like videos by terrorists). It's great that you're an adult about it, but the media and media consumers love getting upset over things like this. Advertisers used to be more accepting of YouTube as a platform instead of a curator of content, until the public outcry against it. This is why we can't have nice things.
swiley 6y ago
I hope they double down on instant AI driven bans and the platform dies. We have better alternatives based on activityoub.
drak0n1c 6y ago
Advertisers, youtubers, users, brands - everyone was happy prior to the era of demonetization. What killed the golden goose was an extremely small set of activists and journalists (specifically Media Matters and Vox) methodically threatening brands with publication of screenshots of their "support" for controversial niche videos. And just enough brand marketing and YouTube employees were cowed, or at least ideologically sympathetic.
- Pxtl 6y ago
  I know, everything was fine when the YouTube recommendation engine accidentally radicalized half English-speaking world and created a profitable fascist political movement.
  - CGamesPlay 6y ago
    Surely there's some space between "Recommend" and "Ban"?
    - Filligree 6y ago
      Why should people be allowed to watch anything except what's best for them? /s
      - uniqueid 6y ago
        I don't care if what you watch is good or bad for you. I care if what you watch turns you into a threat to me. Based on the past few years, it looks like maybe 20% of the general population is suggestible enough to endanger the rest of us.
        TheCraiggers 6y ago
        The problem is that the other guy is saying the same thing you are. The radical left and the radical right both think each other's points are dangerous. And the moderates are pointing at both sides and claiming the same thing. From their respective viewpoints, they're in the "right", just as you think you are. There's a slippery slope here, and I feel it's one so large that we can't even tell we're already sliding on it. The obvious answer is a well-informed populace that isn't easily swayed by emotion and fear, and has the time and inclination to do their own fact checking. Trouble is, that's obviously a pipe dream. Other ideas, such as Facebook's new governing body are interesting, but I fear will be troublesome in other ways. Still, it's an experiment in the right direction I believe.
retox 6y ago
>can advertisers stop being afraid of anything and everything? This is what I don't understand. If my memory serves, the whole demonetization debacle started when some activists at a newspaper wrote an article about big brands having ads on Alex Jones' content, in which they reached out to the brands and asked "are you happy with your content being seen next to XYZ?"[1][2] It struck me as just another article in a long list (that continues to today) where a legacy media giant lashes out at new media because they're worried about ad revenue being taken from them, the 'rightful' recipients. If people are watching a video, regardless of the content, they are almost certainly there because they enjoy that content. Isn't this the point of all advertising; you want your brand on display when someone is enjoying something to (sub-consciously?) associate your brand with the enjoyment the viewer is experiencing? I wonder if there is a case to be made for loss of earnings for shareholders if the pool of eyeballs seeing their brands messaging is continually diluted. I suppose the counter-argument is that the brands don't want their advertising funds to go to an organization they have moral disagreements with, but that certainly hasn't stopped them in the past. Is the income from a washing machine sale any less valuable if it comes from someone not politically aligned with you, or if they saw it while browsing a porn site? (I'm not interested in discussing Alex Jones). It seems to boil down to not wanting to be 'cancelled' and have the twitter-mob making waves and threatening boycotts. [1] Mashable article about the advertising pull out - https://archive.is/6LkmL https://archive.is/6LkmL [2] The hit piece from CNN - http://archive.is/4yHMF http://archive.is/4yHMF
idiocrat 6y ago
Or maybe cancel/ban chess, as it promotes racial differences and dispute settling by the means of aggression/opponent termination. A harmonized/normalized society may not see the color differences or military-style subordination with royal elites hiding behind sacrificial peasants. At least make all figure look alike, gender-less and class-less and color them in random rainbow colors.
- netram88 6y ago
  Is this a joke? I'm sometimes unsure in the digital medium.
jdoliner 6y ago
One day someone will be banned for referring to the algorithms as black boxes.
fsflover 6y ago
> Or can advertisers stop being afraid of anything and everything? Or maybe we should stop supporting a monopoly pressured by everyone and switch to distributed PeerTube instead.
matheusmoreira 6y ago
> Or can advertisers stop being afraid of anything and everything? Would be great but it's never happening. They'll continue shaping the internet by threatening to pull support unless everything is changed to match their sensibilities.

bartread 6y ago

Bear in mind what we have here is an example of the cutting edge of AI in its real world use. It doesn't exactly inspire faith in AI if some of the best is this thick when it comes to making decisions that would be incredibly basic for a human of even below average intelligence.

das4119 6y ago
Frankly the whole thing stinks. On the whim of an unaccountable AI basically anything can happen. We need laws around this sooner rather than later. AIs are getting more powerful but less responsible. Just don't have an argument about a book or you could end up on death row. Gordon Dickson wrote a short story about this https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computers_Don%27t_Argue https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computers_Don%27t_Argue
- Aerroon 6y ago
  Why do we need laws around this? We need to hold the people accountable that put this into production and/or produced it. People should be able to build bad AI, but if that causes poor real world outcomes, then the people that okay'd its use need to take responsibility. "An AI erroneously banned the channel," shouldn't get any more leeway than "A support staff member banned the channel."
  - texasbigdata 6y ago
    Because the inner bias that humans have that might lead to similar exclusion is implicitly hidden and somehow excused and the machines are held to a higher standard, for some reason.
  - CydeWeys 6y ago
    > "An AI erroneously banned the channel," shouldn't get any more leeway than "A support staff member banned the channel. What would curtail the leeway then? Other than losing public trust in the product for this happening repeatedly anyway?
  - notriddle 6y ago
    Apple uses 100% human labor for their app reviews. They get about as much accountability as Google does. Personally, I think the AI is a total red herring.
  - amirkdv 6y ago
    > Why do we need laws around this? We need to hold the people accountable [...] [T]he people that okay'd its use need to take responsibility. Genuinely asking: what do you think profitable companies would do to their ML engineers over a product issue like this if there was no law under which they would be sued? I think accountability without an enforcement mechanism is just a wishful suggestion.
    - Aerroon 6y ago
      >what do you think profitable companies would do to their ML engineers over a product issue like this if there was no law under which they would be sued? Nothing. Maybe a reprimand at best, because the consequences of this are fairly minor. If a store erroneously bans you and them unbans you and says that there was a mixup with their policy, then what do you think should be the consequences to the store? If it's effectively a monopoly then I can see there being problems, but if it's just a random store then that doesn't really matter.
- SilverRed 6y ago
  Youtube is in between a rock and a hard place as well as all user generated content sites. Either they automate removing content and end up removing some of the good with the mountains of bad, or they do it manually which costs a fortune and is too slow. The local news is still ridiculing Facebook because they left the stream up for the NZ shooting for hours and their stated reason "No one watching the video had reported it". Well what do we want facebook to do? Hire thousands of people to watch every single livestream live? IMO we should all move to some kind of self hosting where there is no central mega corp that takes responsibility for the content. You host your own content and you stand behind it legally. As long as its legal content, you have no risk of being shut down.
  - curlypaul924 6y ago
    > Either they automate removing content and end up removing some of the good with the mountains of bad, or they do it manually which costs a fortune and is too slow. I think this is a false dichotomy; they could automate flagging for human review instead. This would address the cost though not the speed. Content awaiting review could be disabled, or it could be disabled only if it is deemed sufficiently egregious.
    - SilverRed 6y ago
      >they could automate flagging for human review instead. I'm not sure this would save them in many cases. Most of the abusive content on facebook is not easily identifiable. I don't think the current AI systems are up to the task. They may be able to identify a human and a dog are in the video but not tell the difference between petting the dog or punching it. Similarly they likely can not tell the difference between someone at a shooting range or committing a mass shooting. Just like it is too much to expect police to stop all crime before it happens, I think it is too much to expect platforms to remove violating content before it is reported.
pishpash 6y ago
Are you sure a human, never mind one of below average intelligence, gets this? We have people right now in Silicon Valley calling for renaming CS words because they sound racist to them.
- Barrin92 6y ago
  of course a human might screw up but OPs general point is right. The AI doesn't even know what 'racism' is. It doesn't know what 'chess' is. It can't do context and it doesn't understand meaning, it just correlates audio signal. That this often looks like intelligence doesn't change the fact that it's incredibly far away from the real thing.

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

throwawayboise 6y ago

Your comment has been moderated for racist language ("black boxes").

lwouis 6y ago
You kid but i've received 2 pull-requests on my open-source project, which only goal was to replace "Blacklist" with "Blocklist" in the app preferences. I don't receive many PRs. This is a real trend.
- jaimex2 6y ago
  I just block people from the project who submit PRs like that.
- whatshisface 6y ago
  Funny thing is, since nobody ever submits PRs to change it in the opposite direction, even one person going around on GitHub would be virtually guaranteed to eventually change all of them.
  - reaperducer 6y ago
    even one person going around on GitHub would be virtually guaranteed to eventually change all of them It only took one complaint from someone in Canada to get Dire Straits' "Money for Nothing" cut in half on SiriusXM for an entire continent. (Though you can still hear the full version on the deep tracks channel).)
    - metalliqaz 6y ago
      they cut it in half rather than just bleep the "F" word?
      - reaperducer 6y ago
        Yep. Dropped the entire verse and a chorus.

teh_klev 6y ago

> nebulous black boxes Probably a nitpick, I think you mean "opaque black boxes", you can see things through a nebula.

trynton 6y ago
@teh_klev: >> nebulous black boxes > Probably a nitpick, I think you mean "opaque black boxes", you can see things through a nebula. Your comment has been modded into invisibility :[
vlozko 6y ago
> (of a concept or idea) unclear, vague, or ill-defined. The other definition of nebulous.
andrewzah 6y ago
No, I meant nebulous as in unclear, hazy, or undefined. Nobody knows what the YouTube algorithm is going to decide is inappropriate next. Their site’s wording is very vague and unclear as well. You have youtubers censoring swear words now, and people uploading footage from video games like TF2 have had issues before.
- teh_klev 6y ago
  > Nobody knows what the YouTube algorithm is going to decide is inappropriate next. Then that is the very definition of "opaque", which is what YouTube want and aim for.
  - titzer 6y ago
    Do we really need to split hairs like this? The algorithms aren't completely opaque, as they have been trained on a set of representative inputs, and are continuously monitored. They are based on neural networks, presumably, with weights inspectable by the engineers deploying the model. So it is more "nebulous" and not completely opaque.
    - 6y ago

root_axis 6y ago

Or maybe stop expecting corporate ad delivery networks to care about anything other than delivering ads.

himinlomax 6y ago

Youtube doesn't need stupid black boxes to make stupid decisions; look at their recent banning of a satirical Pewdiepie music video, for allegedly encouraging harassment. (It was a joke aimed at a nursery rhyme channel, how do you harass a nursery rhyme channel?)

Tenoke 6y ago

When they don't incorporate quick banning they get piled on by a mob for letting this or that bad person on their platform. And it's near impossible to monitor all of Youtube just with content moderators.

nostromo 6y ago
> piled on by a mob That’s the perception - but usually it’s at most a few hundred busybodies on Twitter, out of Google’s billions of users. People just need to start ignoring these people. They are a tiny minority of people. (It just so happens that seemingly half of them are journalists at the nation’s biggest newspapers.)
- Tenoke 6y ago
  I guess that's true but only until the NYT or whoever decides to join in as well.
  - jeofken 6y ago
    NYT in the end though, is just one big blog, owned by a group with their own interests. Only when their interests line up with those of Google and Facebooks owners would they work in tandem. The solution for those wanting unfettered culture in the Information Age, not beholden to big finance and big techs whims, remains free and distributed software, such as running your own blogs, peertube, etc

karmasimida 6y ago

> Or can advertisers stop being afraid of anything and everything? Maybe the advertisers are doing this on purpose? Deep down they know they would lose almost nothing by pulling from those platforms for a short period of time (the quality of online advertising has been in doubt for a long time), while pleasing the vocal minority. At the same time, by playing moves like this would absolutely bring Google/Youtube to their knees, making it clear who is paying the bill.

deelowe 6y ago
That's exactly it.
spamizbad 6y ago
Advertisers have always been extremely risk-adverse. If your ad (either it’s contents OR it’s placement) hurts the brand you’re in trouble. Notice how there’s tons of product placement in PG-13 movies, but far less in those rated R?

jimmaswell 6y ago

There are way too many videos for manual review and the relatively rare false positive (one high profile case every few months vs how many videos uploaded every day?) is worth the gain in efficiency. But there should certainly be a better manual review process once the AI messes up.

AndrewUnmuted 6y ago
Perhaps this is true - it's quite plausible that there are too many videos uploaded to YouTube for any manual review to scale in a cost-efficient manner. However to me this does not negate YouTube's good-faith responsibility to clarify what kind of product they are and what they intend to do with their service as the years go by. These mistakes are extremely costly and potentially offensive to the end user, no matter how rare they may be in daily practice. YouTube made very foolhardy decisions to encourage the ingestion of any and all video content from just about all kinds of people. This had the impact of normalizing video content production practices, giving AI-directed content moderation a false sense of success in its early days of deployment. As content has grown more complex and nuanced on these platforms, the AI systems deployed have miserably failed to accommodate these changes in the ecosystem. It's all in an (IMO) futile effort for YouTube to make good on their reckless company roadmap without specific people having to take personal responsibility for their blunder.
jandrese 6y ago
There are way more than one rare false positive per month. These cases are so frequent they usually aren’t even considered news anymore. A few months ago some creators tried to organize but I’ve not heard anything from that effort recently. Google isn’t a government, there isn’t much you can demand from them. They aren’t accountable to you.

dehrmann 6y ago

Setting this case aside because it's sloppy reporting based on what another classifier found, this is a hard problem. Youtube gets too many videos and comments for humans to manually review them. Flagging helps, and Google likely uses ML more complex than just text and classifier (who is commenting, is the post trending, patterns in comments, etc.) When things do reach manual review, remember that humans make mistakes, possibly more often than ML, this could be human error. You actually want the algorithm to be a black box so that people don't know that you can trick it by only commenting between 5pm and 8pm on an IP in the Netherlands from Chrome, and avoid using words like "cactus." The important part here is a transparent appeal process, not that ML is only pretty good at these problems.

phone8675309 6y ago
> When things do reach manual review I’ve yet to see a case of the hoi poloi get a manual review - you either are a well enough known YouTuber where they have humans dedicated to you, you know someone who works at YouTube and can intercede on your behalf, or you have to whip up a Twitter mob big enough that it hurts YouTube's image or stirs up people with contacts at YouTube. Even then, sometimes that doesn’t work - look at the Terraria dev. YouTube effectively has no manual review for 99.9% of people which is why its automated systems accuracy is so important.
- rmrfrmrf 6y ago
  The press are the manual reviewers, and articles like these are merely examples of the escalation process.
- dehrmann 6y ago
  Be careful not to confuse manual review with an appeal. When I say "manual review," I mean the classifier isn't sure, so a human double checked, or it was sent to a human to validate the classifier. You're right--appeals are hard to get--but we have no idea how much Youtube manually reviews content.
- polishTar 6y ago
  It's a genuinely hard problem, but they do have appeal systems that creators can use that go to human reviewer queues for things like video removals and demonetization even though the first pass is done via automation, but don't think humans aren't immune from mistakes either. As of 2018 youtube had 10,000 manual reviewers (and I imagine it's significantly more than that today), but at their scale, that realistically won't go that far.

c3534l 6y ago

> Or can advertisers stop being afraid of anything and everything? They can't, because there were a number of high-profile media storms blaming companies for advertising on YouTube when some of the content was distasteful by chance (like videos by terrorists). It's great that you're an adult about it, but the media and media consumers love getting upset over things like this. Advertisers used to be more accepting of YouTube as a platform instead of a curator of content, until the public outcry against it. This is why we can't have nice things.

swiley 6y ago

I hope they double down on instant AI driven bans and the platform dies. We have better alternatives based on activityoub.

drak0n1c 6y ago

Advertisers, youtubers, users, brands - everyone was happy prior to the era of demonetization. What killed the golden goose was an extremely small set of activists and journalists (specifically Media Matters and Vox) methodically threatening brands with publication of screenshots of their "support" for controversial niche videos. And just enough brand marketing and YouTube employees were cowed, or at least ideologically sympathetic.

Pxtl 6y ago
I know, everything was fine when the YouTube recommendation engine accidentally radicalized half English-speaking world and created a profitable fascist political movement.
- CGamesPlay 6y ago
  Surely there's some space between "Recommend" and "Ban"?
  - Filligree 6y ago
    Why should people be allowed to watch anything except what's best for them? /s
    - uniqueid 6y ago
      I don't care if what you watch is good or bad for you. I care if what you watch turns you into a threat to me. Based on the past few years, it looks like maybe 20% of the general population is suggestible enough to endanger the rest of us.
      - TheCraiggers 6y ago
        The problem is that the other guy is saying the same thing you are. The radical left and the radical right both think each other's points are dangerous. And the moderates are pointing at both sides and claiming the same thing. From their respective viewpoints, they're in the "right", just as you think you are. There's a slippery slope here, and I feel it's one so large that we can't even tell we're already sliding on it. The obvious answer is a well-informed populace that isn't easily swayed by emotion and fear, and has the time and inclination to do their own fact checking. Trouble is, that's obviously a pipe dream. Other ideas, such as Facebook's new governing body are interesting, but I fear will be troublesome in other ways. Still, it's an experiment in the right direction I believe.

retox 6y ago

>can advertisers stop being afraid of anything and everything? This is what I don't understand. If my memory serves, the whole demonetization debacle started when some activists at a newspaper wrote an article about big brands having ads on Alex Jones' content, in which they reached out to the brands and asked "are you happy with your content being seen next to XYZ?"[1][2] It struck me as just another article in a long list (that continues to today) where a legacy media giant lashes out at new media because they're worried about ad revenue being taken from them, the 'rightful' recipients. If people are watching a video, regardless of the content, they are almost certainly there because they enjoy that content. Isn't this the point of all advertising; you want your brand on display when someone is enjoying something to (sub-consciously?) associate your brand with the enjoyment the viewer is experiencing? I wonder if there is a case to be made for loss of earnings for shareholders if the pool of eyeballs seeing their brands messaging is continually diluted. I suppose the counter-argument is that the brands don't want their advertising funds to go to an organization they have moral disagreements with, but that certainly hasn't stopped them in the past. Is the income from a washing machine sale any less valuable if it comes from someone not politically aligned with you, or if they saw it while browsing a porn site? (I'm not interested in discussing Alex Jones). It seems to boil down to not wanting to be 'cancelled' and have the twitter-mob making waves and threatening boycotts. [1] Mashable article about the advertising pull out - https://archive.is/6LkmL https://archive.is/6LkmL [2] The hit piece from CNN - http://archive.is/4yHMF http://archive.is/4yHMF

idiocrat 6y ago

Or maybe cancel/ban chess, as it promotes racial differences and dispute settling by the means of aggression/opponent termination. A harmonized/normalized society may not see the color differences or military-style subordination with royal elites hiding behind sacrificial peasants. At least make all figure look alike, gender-less and class-less and color them in random rainbow colors.

netram88 6y ago
Is this a joke? I'm sometimes unsure in the digital medium.

jdoliner 6y ago

One day someone will be banned for referring to the algorithms as black boxes.

fsflover 6y ago

> Or can advertisers stop being afraid of anything and everything? Or maybe we should stop supporting a monopoly pressured by everyone and switch to distributed PeerTube instead.

matheusmoreira 6y ago

> Or can advertisers stop being afraid of anything and everything? Would be great but it's never happening. They'll continue shaping the internet by threatening to pull support unless everything is changed to match their sensibilities.