Facebook apologises after AI labels video with black men ‘about primates’

Facebook has issued an apology after its artificial intelligence (AI) technology mislabelled a video featuring black men in altercations with white police officers and civilians as “about primates”.

After social media users finished the clip, published by Britain’s Daily Mail newspaper earlier this week, they received a prompt asking if they would like to “keep seeing videos about primates”.

“This was clearly an unacceptable error and 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,” Facebook spokeswoman Dani Lever said in a statement to USA Today.

“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,” she said. “We apologise to anyone who may have seen these offensive recommendations.”

The incident is the latest in a series of racial blunders online, caused by what is seeming racial bias in automated systems. According to recent studies, facial recognition technology can be prejudiced against people of colour and typically has more trouble identifying them. It has resulted in incidents where black people have been discriminated against or arrested due to a computer error.

In 2015, Google similarly had to apologise after its Photos application mistakenly identified black people as “gorillas”. Later the same year, Microsoft offered a mea culpa after its AI chatbot Tay began spouting racial slurs and had to be pulled offline.