Microsoft's AI Journalists Confuse Mixed-Race Little Mix Singers on MSN Homepage (theverge.com) 76
Microsoft's decision to replace human journalists with AI to run its news and search site MSN.com has been criticized after the automated system confused two mixed-race members of British pop group Little Mix. From a report: As first reported by The Guardian, the newly-instated robot editors of MSN.com selected a story about Little Mix singer Jade Thirlwall's experience with racism to appear on the homepage, but used a picture of Thirlwall's bandmate Leigh-Anne Pinnock to illustrate it. Thirlwall drew attention to the mistake on her Instagram story, writing: "@MSN If you're going to copy and paste articles from other accurate media outlets, you might want to make sure you're using an image of the correct mixed race member of the group." She added: "This shit happens to @leighannepinnock and I ALL THE TIME that it's become a running joke ... It offends me that you couldn't differentiate the two women of colour out of four members of a group ... DO BETTER!"
What (Score:1)
a turd of a story.
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We cover website news inaccuracy around here.
Oh, you were calling the MSN article the turd... my mistake.
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The two women look very much alike and they admit that humans mix them up "all the time".
So an "AI" made a human-like mistake.
Does this mean it passes the Turing Test?
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Actually, interestingly that's more true of Bing than Google.
Bing's image search prominently shows mostly black people, although they're not always looting, and when they are looting it's not always in the US.
Google's image search tends to show white people protecting their stores or cleaning up after vandalism, or white cops in riot gear. Most of the images of black people are either protesters or people who are just
I would caution that both search engines likely shape their results based on who is asking
A more mundane explanation (Score:2)
Re:A more mundane explanation (Score:5, Interesting)
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If it doesn't see the race then it is perfectly not racist, right?
Logic fail (Score:1)
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Why use an AI that makes such a mistake, clearly it isn't up to production level yet.
I know a bunch of White Brogrammers made the code, and they never realized to code traits that make people look different.
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It's cheaper even with the mistakes.
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Exactly.
Now, the universe has changed IRT news photos, I'm sure. But way back when, one thing that surprised me was that reporters and photographers were separate. While they might send a reporter and a photographer to cover a story, there wasn't a necessarily a link between the two. You might have a caption that you could use with a text search (eg, "Find news stories whose text is like the caption and whose date matches the date of the news story") but that was about it. It was mostly intended to be d
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But I can't get outraged at a reasonable error... I don't like this explanation!
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The AI doesn't create the articles, it just grabs them from other sources and posts. A human editor would more likely be able to spot that there was an error, especially if it's an editor that has experience in the subject matter. The title is misleading, and the summary implies that the AI made the original mistake, so it's another great day in the history of clickbaiting.
City of Birmingham (Score:5, Funny)
Doesn't excuse this reporting though.
Doesn't surprise me (Score:3)
The kind of people who wash up in local councils are one step up from unemployable. They're so useless and/or lazy no private company will touch them so the public sector is where they end up.
Very Confused (Score:1)
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Nothing. It's about an AI and RGB values but someone got offended and decided to make it all about race for attention-seeking purposes.
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They were non-robotic so the AI stereotyped them as "generic human" and decided "all humans look the same" and substituted photo of one for another.
The end of racism (Score:4, Insightful)
The end of racism is when we don't care about race anymore.
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Well it i certainly true when you just claim "and it isn't racism" and ignore anything that might point to racism. Yes, blacks are over represented in prisons. Black also are more likely to be found guilty and are more likely to be given harsher sentences while at the same time black neighborhoods are more heavily policed, but according to you it can't be racism. Gang culture is more prevalent is african american areas, but those areas also tend to be poorer, which is where gangs thrive. And why are they po
Re: Calling out the problems in black society.. (Score:2)
Slavery ended over 150 years ago in the west, that's 6 -8 generations so get over using it as an excuse. The Indians were treated little better by the British yet who do you see everywhere in IT and other professions now? Afro Caribbeans have a manufactured victimhood culture blaming everyone else for their problems except themselves and I'm tired of hearing their whinging and whining.
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> Slavery ended over 150 years ago in the west, that's 6 -8 generations so get over using it as an excuse.
Yeah, because the consequences of poverty dissapear in just one or two generations. Not.
Re: Calling out the problems in black society.. (Score:2)
It's perfectly possible for anyone willing to work hard and if a community cant manage it in 150 years then theres a fundamental problem at its core.
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So people actually did that. Many black people worked hard and even with all the blatant racism and the deck stacked against them started to make money. For example, in Tulsa, OK in the early 1920s was called "Black Wall Street" and was the wealthiest black district int he country. You know what happened then? White came in and destroyed 35 square blocks of buildings and killed and injured a huge amount of black people. This is the single worst incident of racial violence in American history and yet no one
Re: Calling out the problems in black society.. (Score:2)
... but calling out the problems in white society is?
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It really depends what your motivation is (is it too distract from reforms that might reduce help black people) and what you end up attributing those problems too.
As ever it's more complex than just yes/no.
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It has been well established that criminal sentences are lighter and heavier based on a whole range of subjective factors, and those absolutely include appearance and skin color. The entire concept of sentencing guidelines solely exists to try to make the process more fair, and less subjective.
Did you know there are prisoners in jail today, despite members of the jury finding them not guilty? After the civil war all across the south, w
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By stating that these are problems with "black society" you are being racist.
Call out problems with single parent households.
Call out problems with violent gang culture.
Call out problems with crime being seen as preferable to honest work.
Address all of those problems.
The statistics tell us that this will help tremendously help black communities, but we didn't have to be racist to do that, and we also help out people of any colour suffering from those problems.
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"By stating that these are problems with "black society" you are being racist"
In other words anyone who says anything about black people that the woken like you don't agree with is racist? You pathetic excuse for a human.
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Woken? Me? Fucking hell, that's going to upset a few people on here.
It's not what you said about black people that I don't agree with. It's your racist attempt to label 'black society'.
Is it really so fucking hard to acknowledge that there are issues that cause societal problems and that those issues can apply to anybody, whatever their skin colour? Am I being entirely out of order by suggesting we address the issues, rather than focussing on the skin colour of the people they impact?
I'll continue to be a p
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There are particular problems in black societies in the west. People like you who fail to acknowledge that are part of the problem now fuck off and grow up.
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On the contrary, people like me that look at the actual issues instead of treating people as a racial group are the only ones that will make progress.
Racists like you can fuck off.
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Actual issues? LIke out of all the ethnic communities here in the UK - south asians, east asians, jews, afrocaribbeans - only the latter have failed to make anything of themselves yet prefer blame nasty whitey for the gangs, violence and drugs infesting their estates and the general lack of their community achievment. Look at most asian families and at least one child will be a businessman, lawyer, doctor, in IT. Look at most black families and their children are either in low paid employment , unemployed o
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You're racist for making it a racial thing. Which is a shame, your initial post very sensibly did list several real issues that do need to be addressed.
Addressing them will however help, for instance, white boys from poor families, because they have the worse educational outcomes in the country right now. Black children do better at school than they do.
So why would you focus on a single racial group? Address the issues, not the race of the person with them.
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Wow. Spoken like a white man. Not caring about race is the same as ignoring, or worse, a culture that that race may embrace. Do you really think its *just* about skin color?
I have a dream that my children will be judged not by the color of their skin, but by the content of their character.
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I have a dream that my children will be judged not by the color of their skin, but by the content of their character.
Unfortunately, for some people that's not a dream but their biggest fear.
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But *which* white man? Oh, what, Asians are per capita higher income? The Irish are getting fucked as far as whites ? Our *super racist xenophobic culture* has Indian per capita income way above everyone else ? Asian in general leading the way, and half as likely to be killed by a cop? What absolute racist scum this country is. It's definitely only a "white versus black" issue.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
By race
Rank Race Per capita income (2015 US$)
1 A
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Wow. Spoken like a white man. Not caring about race is the same as ignoring, or worse, a culture that that race may embrace.
No it isn't. I can ignore colour while encouraging others to do the same and criticising those who don't. You're just virtue signalling. Badly.
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If someone wishes to adopt cultural mores that they find attractive then their skin colour should have no relevance.
Demanding that cultures are limited to skin colours is fucking racist. Racism is bad. Don't be racist.
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The end of racism is not when we treat all races with equal respect. That implies that for whatever reason we're still keeping track of our differences, putting people into pigeonholes. (And unfairly crucifying anyone who unknowingly puts someone into the wrong pigeonhole.)
The end of racism is when we don't care about race anymore.
I view it somewhat differently. We should care about race, as well as other individually identifying characteristics, because these facets contribute to form part of our identities. Being blind to them erases a part of our identities.
The problem is not acknowledging the existence of distinguishing characteristics (this part of the diversity that we desire) but addressing the inequalities in behavior that arise from prejudicial consideration of those characteristics. The problem is prejudice (e.g., I know
Well, they are doing better... (Score:2)
ummmm me either... (Score:2)
When I google either of them images of both are mixed up along with a couple other people. In either case the most distinctive feature is the eyes and they are identical. Other than that one has a softer chin than the other but not so much that you can identify it clearly in all pictures. There are pictures where I can't clearly identify and I'm sure it is true of the journalists as well.
The problem isn't that the AI can't distinguish, the problem is that the AI is relying on visual recognition to label and
More proof so-called 'AI' is trash (Score:2)
iM oFfEnDeD (Score:1)
No, you're a celebrity. You exist to entertain. Nobody cares how you feel.
The correct response (Score:3)
What's the name of the AI? (Score:2)
By any chance is the AI called Syncopatico? /probably obscure //w1a
That's messed up (Score:3)
The messed up thing about this is that journalists are being laid off in favor of a software program. I know journalists have been in a bad way in recent years, but it's a really scary concept to think that eventually the only news we will get will be word of mouth, whatever X-social-media-platform decides to throw into your feed and from your government, and probably "intelligently fed to you" through an AI software.
Sooner or later most stories we read will be cited with "cause I really think so"...
I don't even really care about the picture thing, I mean they messed up... move along? I guess it does illustrate part of my point though, a proper journalist would probably do all the fact checking before posting...
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In the future Microsoft will plug the revived tay chat bot into the comments section of their computer written news articles, allowing the comments section to be prefilled will racial slurs just like a real news site. This will close the loop and remove humans from the news business altogether.
Re: That's messed up (Score:2)
Oh my god, I remember that! :)
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Sooner or later most stories we read will be cited with "cause I really think so"...
That's orthogonal to them being prepared by AI.
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a proper journalist would probably do all the fact checking before posting
Oh jeeze that's rich. Good thing we can't point to any instances of journalists getting facts wrong.
Re: That's messed up (Score:2)
I think it's ok to be wrong. Provided that is transperant.
I know what you mean, but there are ethical journalists out there.
I wouldnt mind if Fox took on the AI though:)
OH GOD (Score:2)
the automated system confused two mixed-race members of British pop group Little Mix
OH GOD no!!!
Really? Racist? (Score:5, Insightful)
If I showed you a picture of ABBA, can you tell me which of the two (very) white women was Agnetha Fältskog and which was Anni-Frid Lyngstad? Or which of the men was Björn Ulvaeus and which was Benny Andersson? Especially if you went on Google to find pictures and some of them were wrong, but you'd made a good-faith effort to get it right and can show your sources?
Outrageous! (Score:1)
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This is Little Mix We're Talking About (Score:3)
They're all interchangeable non-entities. I imagine they struggle to tell themselves apart.