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A YouTube chat about chess got flagged for hate speech
- dorkwood 5y agoIt's never been confirmed that the language of chess is the reason the channel was flagged. It's all speculation. A fishing channel being taken offline due to hate speech, for example, is a boring story. The same thing happening to a chess channel is much juicier due to the implication that an AI accidentally flagged the words "black" and "white" as racist. There are a lot of reasons to be outraged by that idea, but it's important to remember that it may not have happened.
- schwartzworld 5y agoAnd then it blows up here because HN has a lot of people who are disproportionately upset about default branches being called "main" instead of "master".
- swalls 5y agoThe amount of slippery slope argument and strawmanning on HN when it comes to topics like this is pretty embarrassingly Daily Mail-ish.
- username90 5y agoThe slipper slope has already happened, we are already at the point where words that had no bad connotations and didn't offend anyone are changed. Continuing to change words like that is just pushing constant frustration and costs billions in lost hours changing and fixing old build systems, of course people push back against that!
- swalls 5y agoThese are problems coming from single entities trying to retroactively predict outrage. There is no grassroots activists trying to change white/black in chess. There was no grassroots actvists trying to change master/slave - it came from inside github. Language doesn't change unless the population/community changes it. I think the bigger story here is the misuse of AI where a human moderator would've made a better decision.
- Chris2048 5y ago> Language doesn't change unless the population/community changes it Which may or may not include coercion?
- Chris2048 5y agoYou don't think there is a slippery slope from banning one form of speech, to another?
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- Clewza313 5y ago> “White’s attack on black is brutal. White is stomping all over black’s defenses. The black king is gonna fall … ” Fortunately there's an easy solution: we can just replace "white" and "black" with neutral alternatives like "allow" and "deny" or "pass" and "block".
- basilgohar 5y agoWas this reply made by an AI? The context of the suggestions seem GPT-3 close...
- axiom92 5y agoThis is what GPT-3 (davinci, the 175B parameter model) generates for real: * Prompt: ">White’s attack on black is brutal. White is stomping all over black’s defenses. The black king is gonna fall..." Fortunately there's an easy solution: * GPT-3 Response: Just don't play chess! This is the only solution. The reason for this is that the "chess is bad for you" argument is a logical fallacy called "affirming the consequent". It goes like this: If A, then B B Therefore A In other words, if chess is bad for you, and you play chess, then you'll be bad for you. The fallacy can be seen by simply replacing "A" and "B" with two different statements, for example: The sky is blue Some birds fly Therefore, some birds are blue. See the difference? The argument against chess can be logically rephrased as "Chess is bad for you, and those who play chess will be bad for you. Therefore chess is bad for you."
- kbelder 5y ago"Chess is bad for you, and those who play chess will be bad for you. Therefore chess is bad for you." Can't find a flaw in that argument.
- flippinburgers 5y agoThey are referencing the whitelist/blacklist debacle.
- Clewza313 5y agoBleep bloop. No, I was just testing out Poe's law.
- gsich 5y agoNot the first time. Bound to happen. My main gripe is that Google has no money or brains to actually enlist humans to solve such problems.
- smabie 5y agoI mean i think Google has both money and brains
- gsich 5y agoApparently not.
- kevincox 5y agoYou are assuming that this "problem" is costing them more than hiring some humans. This article sounds more to me like the media making some sensational story. It seems unlikely that there is significant impact to YouTube from this event.
- gsich 5y agoOf course it has no impact on Youtube.
- anthk 5y agoThat's what happens when you mix clueless relativism with figurative language.
- shp0ngle 5y agoWell. The speech police started changing "blacklist" and "whitelist" in programming context, even when those had no racist history; maybe it's time to change it in chess. (After all, white always goes first, that is not very PC.) Rename "black" and "white" to "second player" and "first player".
- Waterluvian 5y agoChange the colours too. Red and neon brown.
- SilverRed 5y agoFirst and second implies a hierarchy and uneven power balance. Both players should have their turns simultaneously.
- user3939382 5y agoYou can be #1 and I'll be #A.
- SilverRed 5y agoThat sounds like segregation. Putting different players in to different sets.
- ikornaselur 5y agoYeah, or the Mongooses, that's a good team name. "The Fighting Mongooses."
- fighterpilot 5y agoI thought of this and realized it'd actually be a fun game. Both players write down their next move and then move simultaneously once both are ready. To avoid race conditions, if a player moves a piece that is to be taken by the opponent's move, then that player has saved that piece with that move. That creates an interesting dynamic where you may not wish to take the most valuable piece if you predict the other player will move out of the way.
- daenz 5y agoI honestly wouldn't be surprised if someone makes the argument that this automated flagging is an indicator that chess's language is inadvertently racially charged. And think about the concept of "white goes first." All it takes is a few viral tweets, and suddenly the game of chess is in the crosshairs.
- hyperhopper 5y agoIn my opinion, that might be a sign that the idea of drawing abstract connections between words and concepts, that are several layers of indirection apart, may be going too far. Yeah using language that upsets people is bad, but if you allow enough layers between words and concepts, _everything_ can be argued to be offensive for one reason or another. Or will be soon once something else becomes a hot button issue.
- kleer001 5y ago> using language that upsets people is bad Shouldn't be. Intent should be the grounds for upset, intent only. Otherwise you get a Euphemism Treadmill, and that's a goddamn fucking waste of time.
- godelski 5y ago> intent only. I disagree. Intent matters, a lot, and you're right, but it isn't the only thing. Right now I think we fall on the other side, that reception is all that matters (in the bias training I receive they specifically mention that it is 100% reception and not intent). I believe the law works on reception because that's easier to quantify. Intent is very tricky. You can do something that most people would consider wrong and just say "well I didn't mean it that way." (the inverse can happen too, but less people are likely to start a legal case out of spite compared to people defending themselves. It is tricky) I believe that there is a middle ground somewhere. Where that is I'm not sure and I think we need to work together as a society to figure that out. I think somewhere in there there is a "reasonable" set of norms, and we have other laws to suggest that we can use this as a basis. But even this can be tricky as there are many different cultural norms and customs. It isn't even just ethnic customs. In America we have very different regional customs that often butt heads. I think we need to recognize that people are different and operate based on different values and often this is fine. But I think a big thing we've lost in our current standing is good faith. There's three parts to any form of communication. 1) The idea that is within one's head that they are trying to convey to the other person. 2) The words, body language, inflection, etc that are used to codify this idea (aka: encoding). 3) The understanding of that language that was used to convey the idea (aka: decoding). Humans are pretty good encoders and decoders (we wouldn't have made it here where we are if we weren't) but there are limitations. Language is extremely messy and we often don't think it is because we're so used to it. But you can look at words being used today and you'll often find that people are talking past one another because they are using different definitions of the same word and actively refuse to interpret the other person's intended message (as an example, every internet conversation about capitalism/socialism/communism). The point of communication is to pass one idea from one head to another head. It requires understanding that there are these three components. If we do not act in good faith then we cannot communicate. With that knowledge it suggests there are two different actions to take if one wants to act in good faith. The communicator should try to encode their thoughts as best as they can, attempting to understand their audience (aka: speak to your audience). BUT we often forget that the listener's job is to decode, to do their best to determine the idea that the communicator is trying to convey (aka: __intent__). In fights we will say "but you said..." even knowing what was intended as a way to win. This is not in good faith but is so prevalent. When conversations are about mic drops and one upping another person, communication cannot be had.
- temp8964 5y agoI am surprised international chess organizations haven't denounced racism and announced the plan to change "white" and "black" to "A" and "B".
- emadabdulrahim 5y ago"A" and "B" would imply that English is superior to other languages. It also implies hierarchy since "A" comes before "B". Chess is sexist because the game ends when the King dies. I say we should ban Chess. Cheers.
- visarga 5y agoIn order to enforce social justice you want a group of activists to impose restrictions and police other groups of people? How would they convince those people to give up their freedom?
- corona-research 5y agoThis is no censorship. Youtube only protects us from false information!
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- underseacables 5y agoOh no. Please. Not chess. Can’t we just leave this one alone?
- nemo44x 5y agoNo. Everything must be examined critically through the lenses of social justice. Chess is a Eurocentric and thus colonial game only valued because of its expression of whiteness. Dominance of an opponent of another color reenforces normative racism and the white pieces going first internalizes white supremacy to Black, brown, and indigenous peoples. I won’t even go into the obvious sexism and misogyny of the emotional labor of the womxn piece moving the longest distances in all directions while being valued less than the male piece. We should expect and demand equity in all our so called “games” so that everyone wins.
- colordrops 5y agoUgh, I'm so screwed up. Your comment would be taken as dead serious in some circles and as parody in others. Based on the HN demographic I'm guessing the latter but I'm not sure.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- nate_meurer 5y agoI hate to do this because the parent is good at letting their dry humor speak for itself. But yes, it's parody.
- colordrops 5y agoWhat's the tell here? I've had people dead serious tell me that the US government is racist for making the lowest value coin brown and putting Lincoln on it.
- 5y ago
- dogorman 5y agoGoogle's pursuit of profit is responsible these and innumerable more injustices. Those who would defend Google often claim that automated moderation is necessary at Google's scale, but does anybody really doubt that Google would still make more than enough money to stay in business if they hired more humans? Automated moderation is not necessary.
- goatlover 5y agoHaving the AIs flag things for humans to review prior to anything being banned seems more manageable.
- clircle 5y agoMust be a slow news day. Youtube algo f-ups are just part of platform at this point.
- alpaca128 5y agoAnd that makes it even more important to highlight them. We shouldn't consider censorship a normal everyday event just because some parties do it far too often.
- thoughty 5y agoThere was a star trek channel on youtube which got suspended because he called the fictional race Ferengi “greedy”, which they actually are. Got reinstated after a few days. But it’s getting ridiculous now.
- booleandilemma 5y agoMy wife is a Ferengi.
- fieryskiff11 5y ago(((Ferengi)))
- exporectomy 5y agoI wonder how The Onion gets away with https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q4PC8Luqiws https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q4PC8Luqiws where they suggest visualizing your money related stress as a greedy hook-nosed race of creatures who want to grabble up all your money - and only hire their own kind.
- ficiek 5y agoThat is really well done, Onion used to be amazing.
- smusamashah 5y agoFerengi looks the same as فرنگی if 'g' sounds as in 'girl'. https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/%D9%81%D8%B1%D9%86%DA%AF%DB%8C https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/%D9%81%D8%B1%D9%86%DA%AF%DB%8... "A foreigner, especially a British or a white person." https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/firangi https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/firangi
- account42 5y agoHuh, the Thai ฝรั่ง ("farang", meaning Guava but also used to refer to white people) is also kinda similar. Looks like it has similar etymology and is not just based on the color of the fruit flesh. [0] [0] https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/%E0%B8%9D%E0%B8%A3%E0%B8%B1%E0%B9%88%E0%B8%87 https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/%E0%B8%9D%E0%B8%A3%E0%B8%B1%E...
- hirundo 5y agoWe need a word or phrase for this phenomenon, where we attempt to substitute human pattern recognition with algorithms that just aren't up to the job. Facebook moderation, Tesla Full Self Driving, the War Games movie, arrests for mistaken facial identification. It's becoming an increasingly dystopic force in our lives and will likely get much worse before getting even worse. So it needs a label. Maybe there's a ten syllable German word that expresses it perfectly?
- MontyCarloHall 5y agoArtifactual Intelligence?
- inter_netuser 5y agoActual Idiocy
- verdverm 5y agoAnti intelligence?
- themodelplumber 5y agoArtifice Intelligence
- visarga 5y agoArtificial stupidity.
- inter_netuser 5y agoArtful Stupidity might go down better.
- Kalium 5y agoThere's The Scunthorpe Problem, which seems like a specific instance.
- 5y ago
- tdhz77 5y agoA friend of mine was banned for sending a chat message that said “this is a Mexican standoff” — the people in the room were both Mexican, if it matters.. we were all confused on why he was permanently banned.
- nemo44x 5y agoBecause it implies the Mexican race can’t resolve disputes without violence thus normalizing xenophobia.
- hn_throwaway_99 5y agoI think I'm more offended you referred to "the Mexican race". Mexican is not a race.
- wccrawford 5y agoDid you miss the part where everyone involved was Mexican?
- nemo44x 5y agoI was trying to mimic an overzealous hall monitor there and choose ignorance for effect. I don’t think it worked as the rating and the flagging indicate.
- EdwardDiego 5y ago
- MetaWhirledPeas 5y agoWhat a fine mess we've created. - Popular experiences tend to be better experiences, so we all congregate to the same services - Homogenous user behavior leads to monopolistic situations, increasing outrage when anything goes wrong - Even if the government doesn't try to enforce moderation, the company attempts to self-moderate to maintain its image - The popularity of the service makes human moderation impossible, creating a need for inevitably-flawed robots I see no solution. The only way to win is not to play.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- skohan 5y ago> The popularity of the service makes human moderation impossible, creating a need for inevitably-flawed robots That's true, but we might be able to improve things with a bit more human moderation. For instance facebook is insanely profitable. They could probably increase their staffing for moderation by a pretty decent multiple and still be very profitable. So the current state of moderation is not strictly a matter of need, it's also a matter of greed in terms of Facebook wanting to automate away jobs they could pay people to do. And given the state of online discourse, it's a decision we're all paying for.
- blfr 5y agoThen you have the problem of bias in human reviewers. I don't think you can solve the problem of censorship with just a few more hires.
- convery 5y agoIn the past for a game-modding project we sort of opensourced reports. Users (meeting certain criteria) could visit a page and view 5 seconds of video and statistics of an alleged/detected cheater. Then select positive/negative/inconclusive. If (IIRC 5 users) had voted and the majority said positive/negative then a ban/unban would be issued. Because it was random reports and the usernames were hidden, there were no obvious bias.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- aaron695 5y agoIt's probably suicide. Not hate speech. And they weren't talking about chess. Skydiving and the abstract of jumping. But let's love everyone's cliche from 2010, long ago solved if it ever existed AI is racist or too not racist.
- motohagiography 5y agoI'm actually starting to think we only see these stories about absurd censorship to make the more commonplace and pernicious stuff seem legitimate by comparison. "Oh, hahah, our totally legitimate censorship ML that uses language models to isolate people from each other based on predictions of patterns in their thinking made a funny goof! Gee whiz, you got us that time!" Anyway, Google will be fine. Lots of tech companies have managed to re-brand after getting on board with idealists, just look at Hollerith.
- TehCorwiz 5y agoIllusory Intelligence.
- api 5y agoThis reminds me of a story from a previous era of automated content moderation... When I was a student at the University of Cincinnati, I was a member of a group called LARC which stood for Laboratory for Recreational Computing. The main purpose of LARC was to get the University of Cincinnati to subsidize our yearly trip to DEFCON, but I digress. The UC mail servers, or at least the ones where the LARC mailing list was hosted, had some kind of stupid search and replace censorship to replace naughty words with cleaner equivalents. The cleaner equivalents were in ALL CAPS of course. So a few members of LARC were working on a project to build a classical arcade cocktail table game out of Linux and MAME and some other stuff. I don't remember the details. All I remember is that the mail server transformed this into the "MALE GENITALIAtail table". This became its official name. I think the MALE GENITALIAtail table was eventually installed in the student union.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- gundmc 5y agoThis is from March and was discussed heavily on here at the time. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26218476 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26218476
- soheil 5y agoIt's even older than that it was first discussed in July last year https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23729156 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23729156
- stretchwithme 5y agoWhen does AI start being smarter than us? Can't wait.
- tehnub 5y agoAgadmator, the person who made the video in question, also made a video soon after explaining the situation, and gave some hypotheses on why the video got taken down. In addition to the reason being hate speech, he suggested it may have been because they discussed Covid-19, lockdowns, etc, and YouTube was attempting to stop the spread of misinformation. The video I’m talking about is here: https://youtu.be/KSjrYWPxsG8 https://youtu.be/KSjrYWPxsG8
- eloisius 5y agoThat adds some color to the situation but it's still worrisome that we're becoming so averse to misinformation that platforms are censoring the discussion of misinformation. This isn't going to help the misinformed. For a real world example: I was chatting with a close personal acquaintance who was semi-sympathetic to the Proud Boys privately via FB Messenger. They wouldn't believe me that the Proud Boys had a rule not to masturbate, so I tried to share a link from the PB website. Messenger wouldn't send the message, but didn't outright say it was banned content either. I tried again using an archive.org archive link to the page, same error: "Send failed. Operation could not be completed." It seems weird to outright ban the discussion of certain things on public platforms, but even more weird to ban it within private chats.
- kleer001 5y agoLet me off this euphemism treadmill! Please, I'm getting ill.
- busymom0 5y agoArtificial Unintelligence.
- dukeofdoom 5y agoWell at least it wasn't for corrupting the youth.
- imvetri 5y agoWhere there is rejection for hate, there will be love for hate.
- barbarbar 5y agoIt is obvious that there are no such problems when ai is used for driving cars and flying drones. /s
- Haga 5y agoButtlenagged = Archibald buttle + nagging by software
- prvc 5y agoThis is a perfect example of "be careful what you wish for". The Wired position seems to be "just put more resources into policing speech, which is a good and necessary activity". My hunch is that cases like these (false positives, at least, as currently judged by the current authorities) will proliferate just as the criteria for judging what constitutes unacceptable speech do. I would challenge the would-be censors to define specifically, in a way not requiring an additional consultation with them for more infusions of judgement, just what types of utterances that they want to suppress, and why. The closer one gets to this, the more the case for censorship will dissolve. Tl;dr: they are complaining about ambiguity in the implementation of the solution, while having failed to define the problem.
- _Mark 5y agoI had a video flagged, and marked as adult content because the title had "Hump Day" in it. I am not sure in other parts of the world, but in Australia Hump day is the middle day of the week, A.K.A Wednesday.
- Foomf 5y agoThat's absolutely a saying in the United States as well. At least, I've heard it used regularly in both Washington State and Montana.
- obiwanpallav1 5y agoThis is very similar to the Myntra's logo incident[1] in India. 1. https://www.thequint.com/neon/gender/myntra-logo-change-offensive-to-women https://www.thequint.com/neon/gender/myntra-logo-change-offe...
- Trias11 5y agoI'd stay level higher. It's our reliance on dominating platforms. Their wrong choices of wrong technology negatively affects lots of people. Government here suppose to interfere but lots of bribery is in place to prevent anything meaningful to happen
- 0ld 5y agoif i am writing a youtube comment and care about it, i always recheck if the comment is still there after a couple of minutes and then a couple of days. because the comments are now "disappearing" more and more frequently the last time my comment got automatically deleted right away was a couple of weeks ago for "bottle opening" words (in my language) put together. replacing a few letters in these words with different same-looking characters helped for some time, but eventually even these got deleted a few days later. i should probably give up using this last google service i still use
- OhWellLol 5y agoChess is systematically racist, so this is fine
- helsinkiandrew 5y agoGiven there's 500 or so hours of video uploaded per minute (or some other huge amount), i'm not sure we can expect YouTube to moderate each potential violation. Each video constitutes a miniscule amount of revenue. The only solution (I see) to this is for YouTube to charge for each upload - say $1 a video (there may need to be different prices in different parts of the world), this wouldn't detract the majority of uploaders and would pay for checking hate speech, copyright violations etc.
- LatteLazy 5y agoWe demand censorship. We refuse to pay for it. We cry when it's done on the cheap. And it's all their fault!
- kevincox 5y agoMore like: - The media thinks that people will read an article about "inappropriate" content on YouTube. - YouTube gets embarrassed and tries to remove inappropriate content. - The media thinks that people will read an article about "appropriate" content being flagged on YouTube. I feel like YouTube just made the mistake of jumping onto this never-ending treadmill of trying to please the media. Of course that isn't the entire problem. They do "need" to remain attractive to advertisers. So demonetization (or at least some "safe for all advertisers flag") needs to exist so that conservative advertisers keep finding the platform attractive. (However I feel the response could have been much finer grained. For example allow advertisers to opt-into different categories of "inappropriate" content. For example some brands have not problems being next to violent content. This way you would still make less money from an "inappropriate" video but you would at least take home something.).
- b0rsuk 5y agoMaybe they should train their networks on memes and make it do the opposite ;-).
- Asooka 5y agoI guess this just shows how backwards and racist Chess terminology is. It may have been fine back in the day, but I want my children to grow up in a world where Blacks and Whites aren't at war. The sides should be switched to much more neutral names, e.g. based on light - lumen/umbral or something based on trees - teak/mahogany. Obviously we should also replace "attack", "check" and "mate" with non-hate-speech - maybe "push", "jeopardy" and just remove "mate", as you can say the same thing by "I believe you have run out of valid moves to make and thus I win". Not like this is without precedent - I remember back when pieces were said to kill each other and then it was replaced by "capturing". Come to think of it "capturing" as an objective is also rather problematic, maybe we should call it "liberating", since you're really returning these peasants who were forced to serve their king back to their homes.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- causi 5y agoThe infection of Youtube with Google's fetish for replacing people with machines may be the worst thing about the entire acquisition. Google's obsession with forever increasing the ratio of users to employees is a curse upon us all.
- dtx1 5y agoBanning a Chess Video for using Black and White as hate speech is so insanely bad. I would love to see an experiment where the same discussion about the game is done but replacing Black and White with actually racist Terms. > N-Word Horse to B4 > Superior Race Queen to C5 > N-Word Pawn beats Superior Race Pawn > ... And see if the algorithm flags that too. I´d bet good money it does not... Just a few examples: * https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IcBCy5SYEps https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IcBCy5SYEps * https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hLOw_SzkRQ8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hLOw_SzkRQ8 * https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Kppx4bzfAaE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Kppx4bzfAaE
- Hyolobrika 5y agoMaybe they should stop deciding what people can and can't say. That would solve the problem, wouldn't it.
- commandlinefan 5y agoAs poorly defined as "hate speech" is, who's to say that the bot wasn't correct in flagging the chat in question in the first place?
- kevincox 5y agoThe problem is that many advertisers don't want their ads appearing next to "unsavory" content. So if they don't do a "good enough" job flagging inappropriate videos less ads will be bought. It isn't really a choice that YouTube is making. It is them attempting to remain appealing to advertisers.
- babesh 5y agoYouTube overall generates tremendous value for people who view videos on it. There are so many YouTube videos being generated for the amount of money being made that it is not economically feasible to hire humans to review all the videos. Even if there is a human to review videos that have been flagged, there is a time delay to doing so. YouTube seems to be erring on the side of flagging false positives at least till there is time for human review. The technology reviewing videos is immature. It may not be an engineering failing. It may be a problem that requires a scientific breakthrough. So a valid critique is that there is no effective way to reach a human at Google. Critiquing the technology is pointless.
- franhield 5y agoThis tells us that their AI and algorithm should be improve as a lot of people are interacting with one another in the comment section.
- 6510 5y agoPlaying the devils advocate a bit: Perhaps the computer is entitled to its own opinion? Of course my first thought is to dismiss it as an obvious false positive but objectively it is a war game white vs black. If someone came up with the game today it would be a dubious choice? Connect Four comes in red vs black and yellow vs red, blue vs red. Why not the traditional black vs white?