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YouTube's AI Flags Notre-Dame Fire as 9/11 Conspiracy, Representative Says System Made ‘Wrong Call’

posted by martyb on Tuesday April 16 2019, @11:39PM   
from the Walks-like-a-duck^W-attack... dept.

An Anonymous Coward writes:

Soon after a fire engulfed Notre-Dame cathedral in Paris on Monday, news outlets began streaming live broadcasts on YouTube. Below several of the clips was an odd box of text: A snippet from Encyclopedia Britannica about the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks.

YouTube, a division of Alphabet Inc.’s Google, introduced this text box feature last year to combat the spread of conspiracy theories, including those that question the 9/11 attacks. On Monday, YouTube’s software mistakenly labeled the plumes of smoke in Paris as footage from 2001, triggering the panel below the video.

“We are deeply saddened by the ongoing fire at the Notre-Dame cathedral,” said a YouTube spokesman. “These panels are triggered algorithmically and our systems sometimes make the wrong call. We are disabling these panels for live streams related to the fire.”

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-04-15/youtube-flags-notre-dame-fire-as-9-11-conspiracy-in-wrong-call

Who are the humans to say the AI was wrong on this one? It found a correlation between the two topics and made its decision. The exact reasons for its decision are inscrutable to the humans, they are just contradicting the AI based on preconceived bias or because they don't like the resulting discussion.

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Original Submission

• Re:Yes indeed, who are we Re:Yes indeed, who are we (Score: 0, Troll) by Ethanol-fueled on Wednesday April 17 2019, @12:42AM (1 child)

  by Ethanol-fueled (2792) on Wednesday April 17 2019, @12:42AM (#830738) Homepage

  There's always the examples of the AI that determined, based on raw data, that minority-ridden neighborhoods were bad and in need of additional patrolling. Then the AI was called "racist" or something, and the solution was for more minorities and less whites to develop it.

  But when you feed the AI idealized data rather than raw data, you get things like CNN saying that Hillary had a 90% chance of winning on election night. I doubt that Google's Jewgles working on their AI for Chinese censorship and social scores, and for Darpa's drone target identification systems, are massaging the raw data to be extra-rosy for humanitarian purposes while subverting or killing the dissidents of government clients is at stake.

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• Re:Yes indeed, who are we (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday April 17 2019, @05:27AM

  by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday April 17 2019, @05:27AM (#830842)

  I'd say it was a bad call if the AI called to report a need for trash pickup instead of calling for a fire.

  Parent