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Instagram apologizes for inserting 'terrorist' into Palestinian bio translations
- celtoid 3y agoThey forgot the /s after "sincerely".
- elil17 3y agoThis is the sort of thing that could cause people to lose friends or jobs. This is exactly the sort of thing we should be worried about with AI. I feel like machine translations like those on Instagram should come with a disclaimer (in bold, not fine print!).
- permo-w 3y agothis could easily have happened with non-AI translations
- nerdponx 3y agoNotice that GP said "machine translation", not "AI". Let's think of it instead as a "nonlinear high-dimensional sequence translation model trained on some large and unknown corpus". Does that make it less problematic?
- mcguire 3y agoHow is that not AI?
- HeWhoLurksLate 3y agobecause it isn't smart?
- bobthepanda 3y agoStupidity and ignorance aren’t enough to excuse liability.
- kibibu 3y agoStatistical machine translation is one of those areas that was considered AI until it worked, then it just became tech. See also: speech recognition, grammar checking, OCR, theorem proving
- nerdponx 3y agoThat was kind of my point. I don't think we should be quick to distinguish between "AI" and other algorithms/techniques, because what makes something "AI" is more a matter of opinion and perspective than anything else.
- rat9988 3y agoThen you just missed that non-AI means human depending on context.
- nerdponx 3y agoI don't believe that this could have easily happened with human translation except as an instance of deliberate malice or improbably enormous ineptitude, so I assigned a very low prior probability to that interpretation.
- giraffe_lady 3y agoNo? Why would it?
- elil17 3y agoIf a human translator translated "Praise god" as "Palestinian terrorists are fighting for their freedom" I'm pretty sure they'd be fired immediately. In contrast, Instagram is not going to be taking down their machine translation tool.
- permo-w 3y agonot AI /= human
- coding123 3y ago/= != !=
- i_have_an_idea 3y agoAI /= LLM
- mcpackieh 3y agoWhat did the translation, a dog?
- idonotknowwhy 3y agoGoogle translate or other non-Ai software
- pclmulqdq 3y ago
- giraffe_lady 3y agoLots of things could have happened we're talking about this specific thing that did though.
- ilyt 3y agoWell, if you picked cheapest bidder that copy-pasted it into google translate, maybe. Actual translator doing a job would look at the context and probably figure out that something's not right, but AI have no such double takes, if it for example because of learning material it will link euphemism to actual meaning of the word
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- f233f2 3y agoAre we really at the point where we need a disclaimer saying "automatic translations may not be accurate"?
- delaaxe 3y agowhen it isn't clear that the translation has been done automatically, then yes
- paxys 3y agoHeck most times it isn't even obvious that you are looking at a translation rather than the original text. Plenty of times I'll visit a website and find the text a bit weird, then realize it's because Chrome has automatically translated it to English from some other language.
- elil17 3y agoI think the average person doesn't understand at all what level of accuracy they can expect from AI tools. That is why you have professors relying on ChatGPT to tell them if a student cheated using ChatGPT. HN readers already know not to trust it of course.
- f233f2 3y agoI agree that the average person doesn't generally know how technology works. I think the solution is not to limit the use of technology but to restrict the exposure of the average person to technology until they can prove that they know how it works (some sort of internet license, if you will)
- pjerem 3y agotbf, with AI, even technologists doesn’t generally know how it works.
- TrapLord_Rhodo 3y ago
- alistairSH 3y agoIs there any indication this was a machine/AI translation and not a human?
- oij331 3y agoMaybe this sort of thing will make us less pearl clutch-y and gate-keepy over arbitrary syntax and focus more on people's real needs. Despite the amount of people claiming lack of belief in deities rocketing up the last couple decades, prior experiences get wedged in our memory, alter our DNA. The elders belief in hallucination, nonsense semantics are alive and well in the form of conviction in American Civic Life as we've been experiencing it the last 2-3 decades. Look at Doctorow bleat that life is no longer like the 2000s for him. Trump and the Reaganite cabal as they generationally churn out freaking out. Reciting correct association of meaning to context is the exact kind of police state 1984 was talking to. Here we have social media via screens to remind us every day how the words must fit together.
- wutwutwat 3y ago> This is the sort of thing that could cause people to lose friends or jobs While true I think the larger issue is this is the sort of thing that can get people murdered (the people mislabeled as terrorists)
- botverse 3y ago> This is the sort of thing that could cause people to lose friends or jobs. Not if in the receiving end there is a Palestinian, unfortunately people are not made equal Edit: I misunderstood that the person potentially loosing their job is the one that made the mistake.
- ilyt 3y ago[flagged]
- nerdponx 3y agoYou're being downvoted but you might be right. This is a classic case of your model only being as good as your training data, and of that being really really hard to get right unless you're intimately familiar with the data, its context in the world, and how it was collected/cleaned/processed.
- ilyt 3y agoYup, AI doesn't know what euphemism means. If the word is used in such context as replacement of other 'worse' word (which is pretty common to avoid word filters, like people using "voldemort virus" for COVID to not get flagged by youtube and buried in algorithm, for recent example)
- ChrisArchitect 3y agomore outrage bait from 404media.... It's bad sure, but this has been possible/happening with user-sourced translation 'correction' systems for years like in Google Translate. Anyone could have influenced the translation to include those phrases. And similar effects have been absorbed into automated engines
- callalex 3y agoYeah, when they first launched I was excited to subscribe because I thought paying for tech journalism instead of it being ad-driven would eliminate the clickbait and sensationalism. I unsubscribed after receiving a month of absolute drivel and headlines full of half-truths.
- kikokikokiko 3y ago404 was sprouted out of Vice News. What were you expecting?
- nerdponx 3y agoThat's the whole point of why it's bad. AI isn't HAL or Skynet. It's not "intelligent". It's susceptible to a whole range of problems, and this is a demonstration of what can go wrong even when you have a huge well-funded company working on it.
- local_crmdgeon 3y agoEverything I've seen so far has been absolute garbage. Wonder if anyone from Buzzfeed is involved - similar writing style
- DanAtC 3y agoThe founders come from Vice so yeah, hyperbole abound.
- matsemann 3y agoHow is this "outrage bait"? It describes an event that happened quite accurately, and how the issue came to be is something worth discussing and reflecting on.
- megous 3y ago[flagged]
- greenie_beans 3y agoI asked ChatGPT what the Great March of Return was: > The Great March of Return was a series of Palestinian protests organized by various groups, including Hamas, to demand the right of Palestinian refugees and their descendants to return to their ancestral homes in what is now Israel. The protests took place along the border between the Gaza Strip and Israel and were intended to draw attention to the Palestinian refugee issue and the ongoing Israeli-Palestinian conflict. > These protests often resulted in clashes with Israeli security forces, leading to casualties and fatalities on both sides. The situation was complex and highly charged, with different narratives and interpretations of events.
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- zogrodea 3y agoHow did it know the answer when the cutoff date is meant to January 2022? (I just found another instance at [0] so maybe "cutoff" doesn't mean exactly what it seems.) https://www.reddit.com/r/ChatGPT/comments/11iv2uc/theres_no_actual_cut_off_date_for_chatgpt_if_you/ https://www.reddit.com/r/ChatGPT/comments/11iv2uc/theres_no_...
- greenie_beans 3y agothe great march of return was in 2018 - 2019. the idf committed some brutal war crimes against the protestors. watch this video if you'd like to learn more: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HnZSaKYmP2s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HnZSaKYmP2s i shared the answer to expose the bias of chatgpt. it interjected "including hamas" into the answer and said there were "fatalities on both sides".
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- O1111OOO 3y agoPerformed a quick search for ex-cia working at instagram and came up with a ton of hits related to general information about ex-government agents working in key positions at many tech firms. https://start.duckduckgo.com/?q=ex+cia+working+at+instagram&ia=news https://start.duckduckgo.com/?q=ex+cia+working+at+instagram&... I'm not saying this translation error is related to that. I'm also not saying it isn't.
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- _a9 3y agoAfter the twitter files I just assume the government has their grimy little fingers in every company that has access to a large amount of eyes, prime for manipulation
- O1111OOO 3y ago> After the twitter files I just assume the government has their grimy little fingers in every company... Yes... twitter, Yahoo emails, telephone companies... the rabbit hole is deep and well-documented. So much of it illegal and unconstitutional. All we can seem to do is scream into the wind and at best... get downvoted.
- mikrotikker 3y agoNot just the twitter files but the PRISM and NSL leaks, FISA courts etc, as leaked by Snowden. What else is in that trove that we haven't seen yet.
- alephnerd 3y agoEx-government agents from all governments work in tech companies that it's absolutely useless. This just seems to be a dynamically trained MT algorithm that overtrained on charged discourse occurring over the past week. Also, I think FB uses their own MT algorithm instead of Google or Bing Translate for competitive and profit margin reasons.
- statusqueue 3y ago[flagged]
- TeMPOraL 3y agoOn a tangent to the main point, I like the subtle acknowledgement of our new reality - or at least of the one of many sudden shifts in common software tooling: > Google Translate translates the phrase to “Praise be to God.” ChatGPT translates it to "Praise be to Allah" or "All praise is due to Allah." LLMs turned out to be pretty good at translating, and ChatGPT (especially GPT-4) went straight into competing toe-to-toe with Google Translate itself.
- gotoeleven 3y agoI like it when arabic phrases are changed to be more palatable to western know-nothings. Ask the guy saying "alhamdulillah" if he means Allah or if he means God.
- TeMPOraL 3y agoIsn't this the usual "accurate translation vs. localization" issue? There was a more poetic name for it, IIRC. It's an old problem.
- gizmo686 3y agoThis is an even more subtle point. In Arabic, Allah is simply the word for "God". As it turns out, Allah is also the English word for "Muslim God". To take an English example, imagine a Christian saying "God is great", with an option to translate it as either: "God (generic) is great"; or "The Christian God is great". Sure, he was probably thinking of the Christian God when he spoke, but making that explicit in the translation still changes the meaning.
- alephnerd 3y ago"Alhamdulillah" is Arabic for "Praise be to god" and is used by Muslims nowadays as an alternative to Allah u Akbar, Takbir, or Narai-e-Takbir because those 3 terms have been co-opted by Jihadists. This is the equivalent of translating "Praise Jesus" to "I love god and hate abortions" Also, Allah to Arabic native speakers can be used to mean "The Lord" in general. Levantine Christians and even some older Mizrahis will use Allah in daily parlance for "God" or "Lord". For example, in colloquial Hebrew, Yalla/Ya Allah is a common expression similar to "Oh God" or "Jesus" or "Come On" when annoyed.
- 0xedd 3y ago[flagged]
- jessenaser 3y agoI think we need Community Notes for translations now. Imagine Tweets that had this translation problem.
- jncfhnb 3y agoThis is cut off for me. The article seems to be doing some wordplay. Is it actually translating that one phrase to the terrorist thing? Or is it translating a passage that includes that phrase and is semantically much closer to the terrorist thing?
- alephnerd 3y agoIt's translating "alhamdulillah" to "Terrorist". "Alhamdulillah" is Arabic for "Praise be to god" and (edit: to my ear at least) is used by Muslims (edit: by Arabic speakers more often) nowadays as an alternative to Allah u Akbar, Takbir, or Narai-e-Takbir because (edit: I think) those 3 terms have increasingly been co-opted. This is the equivalent of translating "Praise Jesus" to "I love god and hate abortions"
- jncfhnb 3y agoIs that the whole passage? It probably doesn’t matter. I’m just curious because the exact claim I see is > The "see translation" feature for user bios was auto-translating phrases that included "Palestinian" and “alhamdulillah” into "Praise be to god, Palestinian terrorists are fighting for their freedom." Which reads oddly
- alephnerd 3y agoIt seems that Meta probably dynamically trains their MT algo on near realtime discourse to better model linguistic shift. It seems like a smart move, but if you have extremely charged discourse like over the past week, it probably overtrains for inaccuracies.
- AskSocialist 3y ago[flagged]
- OfSanguineFire 3y agoAlhamdulillah is not some recently coined alternative, it has been one of Arabic’s stock expressions for centuries and centuries. It is what Arabic-speaking people (and not just Muslims) have always said after something good happens. It is what Muslims customarily say as they get up from eating a meal, or oddly enough, after they sneeze.
- Slava_Propanei 3y ago[dead]
- Horffupolde 3y ago[flagged]
- baobabKoodaa 3y agoThere's literally no-one on this planet who will genuinely confuse the sentence "palestinian terrorists are fighting for their freedom" with anything other than a machine translation error.
- AlexandrB 3y ago“Two things are infinite: the universe and human stupidity; and I'm not sure about the universe.”
- bilalq 3y agoIf only that were true. I can't speak for the world, but I know there are large swaths of the American population and even many people I know personally and probably have as Facebook/Instagram connections that absolutely would take it at face value.
- baobabKoodaa 3y agoCan you please explain to me what the "face value" is when the sentence itself is incoherent? Is the "face value" that they are "terrorists", or is the "face value" that they are "freedom fighters"?
- AskSocialist 3y agoClearly you are not from America... People here believe that the covid vaccine inserted a microchip that was activated by 5G to control their minds. There are absolutely people here who believe saying "Praise God" in Arabic is a terrorist slang term. I see people demand others get off of planes because they are praying to Allah. Anti-Muslim sentiment in America is very high. I guarantee you there are plenty of folks here who would say, "Well, Instagram wouldn't lie about the translation, sooo....".
- baobabKoodaa 3y ago> People here believe that the covid vaccine inserted a microchip that was activated by 5G to control their minds. There are absolutely people here who believe saying "Praise God" in Arabic is a terrorist slang term. I see people demand others get off of planes because they are praying to Allah. Anti-Muslim sentiment in America is very high. The examples you provided are entirely different from the topic here. I wasn't talking about "anti muslim sentiment" or anything like that. My point was about coherence. Someone who thinks palestinians are "terrorists" will not simultaneously think that they are some kind of freedom fighters. You either think they are freedom fighters, or you think they are terrorists. You don't think both of these things at the same time.
- _ahxg 3y agoI use Facebook translation from Ukrainian to English quite often, and frankly it's much lower quality than Google Translate. Quite often I saw quite similarly absurd stuff coming out of those translations, so I'm not at all surprised at this.
- wutwutwat 3y agoOff topic but who thought naming your site 404 and creating branding with slashes and modal call to actions on page load was a good idea? I almost immediately closed the page thinking the link was bad and I was seeing a 404 status page, because this is the shitty UX on first load on mobile: https://imgur.com/IYDWWBp https://imgur.com/IYDWWBp
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- workfromspace 3y agohttps://archive.ph/etfFT https://archive.ph/etfFT (original website without JS shows a dismissable popup preventing reading the article)
- shashashasha___ 3y agoI assume translating in IG is based on ML based on users data and feedback. so its statistics and not bulletproof. in general its considered a very complex problem as languages are very different from each other. On the other hand, I don't see bbc apologizing for calling hamas terrorists "militants". wonder how many civilians they need to behead and/or burn alive before that happens.
- botanical 3y agoSame can be said of the IDF, them being complicit for Apartheid Israel's war crimes where a majority of innocent civilians have been needlessly killed. They're two of sides of the same coin.
- 8organicbits 3y agoAny ideas what software they are using? Alhamdulillah is a very widely used expression. My guess is that they used an LLM, which translated it correctly but then decided to hallucinate more text. If so, that says that lot about their training text...
- morkalork 3y agoImagine going through customs in a foreign country and they screen your social profiles with an LLM translation like that.
- nonethewiser 3y agoImagine going through customs in a foreign country and they screen your social profiles
- alwayslikethis 3y agoI'm fairly sure the US does this
- nisegami 3y agoUS customs had me give them the credentials for my facebook profile back in 2017, so it's not that uncommon. Edit: I had mentioned twitter as well originally, but I think what happened was I told them my twitter password was in my password manager and offered to get it off my phone (in their possession at the time) but the guy said it wasn't necessary. For context, I was a 22 year old student travelling from my home country in the caribbean to the US after summer break. Also for context, I'm brown and have a muslim name.
- 3-cheese-sundae 3y agoHow did they know you used those platforms?
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- Ar-Curunir 3y agoObvious racism is obvious.
- digggit 3y agoNot really, more an accurate depiction of Hamas supporters.
- jowdones 3y agoThis didn't get the comment it deserves: "LOL" :))
- hkt 3y agoAh, the Western media's racism extends to social media. Predictable.
- bghoo 3y ago[flagged]
- kiwikan 3y agothey're also shadow banning a lot of people who are posting pro-Palestine content, people are sharing short tutorials where they're trying to teach people how to work around the "algorithm". they also deleted an Al-Jazeera presenter’s profile after he criticized Israel[1] [1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37464482 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37464482
- gettodachoppa 3y agoAckshually, it's not censorship because tech giants are doing this for democracy and all that is good in this world.