Facebook has issued an apology after its AI labelled black men as primates.
The error occured the AI asked section of users who were watching a newspaper video featuring black men if the wish to “keep seeing videos about primates”
Speaking to the BBC, Facebook said it was an unacceptable error. The social network said it had disabled the system as investigations into the matter were launched.
“The ‘primates’ recommendation was an algorithmic error on Facebook and did not reflect the content of the video, ” a Facebook representative said.
“We disabled the entire topic-recommendation feature as soon as we realised this was happening so we could investigate the cause and prevent this from happening again.”
“As we have said while we have made improvements to our AI, we know it’s not perfect and we have more progress to make.”
“We apologise to anyone who may have seen these offensive recommendations.”
This is just one of a long list of racial bias errors that have have raised concerned with the increased use of Artificial Intelligence.
In 2015, Google’s photo app AI also labelled black people as gorilla.
Twitter has also admitted to racial bias on labeling Previews for cropped images by its AI.
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