Facebook AI facing backlash for labeling Black Men as ‘Primates’

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facebook labels black man as primates

Racial Bias in Artificial Intelligence (AI) has raised some concerns over the last few years and the latest culprit is none other than Facebook, whose AI platform recently classified black men as primates in a newspaper recommendation to users.

While Facebook has now issued an apology and taken down the misclassified images, the error has once more brought to the forefront the gravity of the misclassifications on the platform. Google’s recognition platform has also in times past identified black men as Gorillas. Twitter has also admitted to racial bias in its saliency algorithm solution.

Facebook now claims to have inducted an inclusive product council to address the touchpoints.

In times past, some AI algorithms have been found to misclassify black males as criminals based on some previously fetched information fuelling the racial bias narrative. A dangerous occurrence that if deployed to legal systems could lead to unfair persecution of males who identify as black.

AI is not only been criticized for its racial bias, as it gets applied to financial systems there is also a real threat of financial stereotyping blocking users from benefits based on past predictions which may not necessarily be accurate.

Because Artificial Intelligence basically creates predictions based on a huge collection of previous data, there is a high probability that not enough samples of people of other races have been fed into those systems or there is an active attempt to sideline underrepresented communities.