Facebook/Photo courtesy of BBC
Facebook has issued an apology and blamed faulty artificial intelligence (AI) for its algorithm identifying Black men as primates.
On Friday, Facebook called the misidentification an unacceptable error in its apology for a glitch that showed up on the app in a video from The Daily Mail’s page, reported The New York Times.
“As we have said, while we have made improvements to our A.I., we know it’s not perfect, and we have more progress to make. We apologize to anyone who may have seen these offensive recommendations,” said Dani Lever, a spokesperson for Facebook.
The video’s post date was June 27, 2020, and the tech company was alerted when a friend of an employee sent a screenshot to her and reported the “error” to her supervisors.
To make matters worse, the video in question was comprised of a series of scenes where Black men were engaged in altercations with white police officers and civilians.
Other tech companies such as Google and Amazon have also come under fire for how their artificial intelligence algorithms are unfavorable to Black people.
One of the newest forms of AI is facial recognition technology that has proven to be detrimental to the life and liberty of Black people due to its use by police departments.
In 2015, Google came under fire after a photo on its Google Photos app also mislabeled Black people as primates.
Google issued an apology and said it would make changes. However, all the company did was censor the words “gorilla,” “monkey,” “chimp,” and “chimpanzee.”
Darci Groves, the Facebook employee who received the questionable screenshots, left the company this summer. However, she was very transparent about its desire to address its long history of racial woes.
“Facebook can’t keep making these mistakes and then saying, ‘I’m sorry,’” she said.
Less than 5 percent of Facebook’s workforce is Black.