‘AN UNACCEPTABLE ERROR’

Facebook AI Slaps ‘Primates’ Label on Daily Mail Video of Black Men

The social media giant apologized.

Facebook’s artificial intelligence slapped a racist label on a video of Black men, asking users who had watched the video if they would like to “keep seeing videos about Primates.” The video, published in late June by The Daily Mail, depicted white people, including police officers, confronting Black men, often unprompted. It showed no primates. The social media company apologized in a statement to The New York Times, calling the AI’s action “an unacceptable error,” saying it had shut off the feature for the time being, and promising to research ways to “prevent this from happening again.” The error calls to mind a similar misstep by Google in 2015, when Google Images labeled pictures of Black people as containing gorillas.