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MIT has taken offline its highly cited dataset that trained AI systems to potentially describe people using racist, misogynistic, and other problematic terms.
The database was removed this week after The Register alerted the American super-college. MIT also urged researchers and developers to stop using the training library, and to delete any copies. "We sincerely apologize," a professor told us.
The training set, built by the university, has been used to teach machine-learning models to automatically identify and list the people and objects depicted in still images. For example, if you show one of these systems a photo of a park, it might tell you about the children, adults, pets, picnic spreads, grass, and trees present in the snap. Thanks to MIT's cavalier approach when assembling its training set, though, these systems may also label women as whores or bitches, and Black and Asian people with derogatory language. The database also contained close-up pictures of female genitalia labeled with the C-word.
[...] Vinay Prabhu, chief scientist at UnifyID, a privacy startup in Silicon Valley, and Abeba Birhane, a PhD candidate at University College Dublin in Ireland, pored over the MIT database and discovered thousands of images labelled with racist slurs for Black and Asian people, and derogatory terms used to describe women. They revealed their findings in a paper [pre-print PDF] submitted to a computer-vision conference due to be held next year.
[...] The key problem is that the dataset includes, for example, pictures of Black people and monkeys labeled with the N-word; women in bikinis, or holding their children, labeled whores; parts of the anatomy labeled with crude terms; and so on – needlessly linking everyday imagery to slurs and offensive language, and baking prejudice and bias into future AI models.
Antonio Torralba, a professor of electrical engineering and computer science at CSAIL, said the lab wasn't aware these offensive images and labels were present within the dataset at all. "It is clear that we should have manually screened them," he told The Register. "For this, we sincerely apologize. Indeed, we have taken the dataset offline so that the offending images and categories can be removed."
In a statement on its website, however, CSAIL said the dataset will be permanently pulled offline because the images were too small for manual inspection and filtering by hand. The lab also admitted it automatically obtained the images from the internet without checking whether any offensive pics or language were ingested into the library, and it urged people to delete their copies of the data:
[...] Giant datasets like ImageNet and 80 Million Tiny Images are also often collected by scraping photos from Flickr or Google Images without people's explicit consent. Meanwhile, Facebook hired actors who agreed to have their faces used in a dataset designed to teach software to detect computer-generated faked images.
Prabhu and Birhane said the social network's approach was a good idea, though they noted academic studies are unlikely to have the funding to pay actors to star in training sets. "We acknowledge that there is no perfect solution to create an ideal dataset, but that doesn't mean people shouldn't try and create better ones," they said.
The duo suggested blurring people's faces in datasets focused on object recognition, carefully screening the images and labels to remove any offensive material, and even training systems using realistic synthetic data. "You don't need to include racial slurs, pornographic images, or pictures of children," they said. "Doing good science and keeping ethical standards is not mutually exclusive."
(Score: 0, Redundant) by Arik on Saturday July 04 2020, @11:06PM (43 children)
If laughter is the best medicine, who are the best doctors?
(Score: 3, Insightful) by hemocyanin on Saturday July 04 2020, @11:17PM (40 children)
The Moral Majority of the 80s has won, though they didn't get the particular god they wanted and they probably didn't expect it to be people on the left to take up the banner of censorship, prudishness, shunning (i.e. canceling), and mass social compliance with doctrines elevated to religious levels. They both might get their wish of a nuclear war with Russia too.
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday July 04 2020, @11:23PM (17 children)
Oh yeah, let us celebrate hate speech instead of shunning it. No one is prevented from sharing their bigotry, rights are still intact. You're just mad that people are finally having to take responsibility for their actions?
Hmmm, maybe you really were a liberal before getting old and out of touch. As with most social trends they usually have occasional errors, but personally I'll take a few people getting flak for accidental/incidental bigotry over innocent people murdered by cops or racist fuckwads.
It is telling how you're more concerned with cancel culture than with cops murdering innocent people.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday July 04 2020, @11:38PM (11 children)
Your statement is bigoted against criminals. All criminals deserve to prevail when pummeling or shooting at the cops.
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday July 05 2020, @12:02AM (10 children)
Oh yeah? So you're saying you are totally fine with police murdering 100% innocent people?
Nice hill you've chosen to die on :|
(Score: 1, Troll) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday July 05 2020, @01:17AM (7 children)
So your dichotomy is:
1) Support all police brutality
--OR--
2) Support all arsonist, looting, murderous criminals.
How about a third choice: prosecute criminals of all types? #AllLivesMatter
Rule of law: not just a great idea, but the best idea.
(Score: 0, Troll) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday July 05 2020, @02:37AM (6 children)
Nah you're just an idiot who likes to move goalposts in an attempt to remain relevant.
Pro-tip, saying All Lives Matter is stupid and makes people think you're an ignorant racist. If you're not a closet racist then you're an idiot who is so tribal and polarized that you need to put your own outrage over the lives of others.
"third choice: prosecute criminals of all types?"
You do realize that regular criminals are prosecuted all the time along with plenty of innocent and non-violent criminals yes? All while murdering police officers are given a few weeks paid leave then let back out on the streets? --- that is why you get called an idiot, and it is a safe bet you're one of the turds who bitched about Kapernick taking a knee.
(Score: 1, Troll) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday July 05 2020, @03:03AM (3 children)
Pro-tip: Only losers buy into leftist attempts at narrative control and projection.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday July 05 2020, @04:44AM (2 children)
Ok nutter
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday July 05 2020, @09:17AM (1 child)
Scratch a leftie, and banned words and hate speech stream out. Thanks for demoing, duplicitous cunt.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday July 05 2020, @08:41PM
My god you rightwing terrorists are such sensitive little bitches.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday July 05 2020, @03:50AM
Aren't we all with Lincoln [twitter.com] on this one?
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday July 05 2020, @08:12PM
It's amazing to me that some people can live so deeply embedded into their little echo chambers that they can even say, let alone believe, that 'all lives matter' is racist, and 'black lives matter' does not have a racist connotation.
I wonder when liberalism in the US died. Whatever remains today is little more than 1984 and some useful idiots.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday July 05 2020, @01:34PM (1 child)
100% innocent people? Oh please, the only case where this might apply is the runner guy, of whom nobody seems to care about. Floyd was a criminal resisting arrest, not saying he deserved what he got, but him being used as an example is fucking ridiculous. The runner guy did nothing wrong (at that point at least, i don't know his life story) but got killed by an ex-cop and his son and some friend of theirs for jogging.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday July 06 2020, @02:58AM
Maybe jogging was against their religion and the black guy was oppressing them?
(Score: 5, Insightful) by hemocyanin on Sunday July 05 2020, @03:31AM (3 children)
That might have some validity had the term "racist" not been expanded beyond all rationality in the same way that "nazi" has. There was a time when if someone told me so-and-so was a nazi, I expected that to be an accurate representation of a person who believed in an identity politics with non-Jewish whites at the apex. Now it just means someone who has a Trump sticker on their car or fails to fly a BLM sign in their yard. It's the same thing with "racist" -- the terms stopped having meaning when literally everything gets tagged with it.
But setting that aside, remember when a Jewish lawyer with the ACLU defended the 1A rights of nazis (like actual identity politics types, not what passes for nazi these days)? There is real philosophical depth to an act like that, one that recognizes that if we succumb to mob preferences, freedom itself is illusory for everyone. https://www.aclu.org/issues/free-speech/rights-protesters/skokie-case-how-i-came-represent-free-speech-rights-nazis [aclu.org]
The antifa regressive left authoritarian position of banning speech through rioting, is intellectually shallow and from a civil rights perspective, incredibly pernicious because when rights apply only to favored groups, nobody has any rights at all. Rights become a mere function of power and woe betide the person who ends up at the wrong end of the gun.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Kalas on Sunday July 05 2020, @08:35AM
Quite wise and I agree wholeheartedly. I just want to add as a side note:
I've taken to calling those types the ctrl-left.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday July 05 2020, @05:55PM (1 child)
Hemo you racist nazi, you!! Antifa is coming to a Starbucks near you! Are you afraid? Shall we have your valet fetch the brown trousers? [netfunny.com]
(Score: 1) by hemocyanin on Monday July 06 2020, @12:38AM
No. I don't drink that corporate swill. Too much sugar and ideology. Support your local roaster.
(Score: -1, Troll) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday July 05 2020, @06:24PM
you must be talking about ahmud arbery. you are a stupid bolshevik's bitch. Arbery was a stupid fucking nigger thief who thought he can go into white people's neighborhoods and houses and steal shit. He was not fucking jogging. When the 30 year cop and his son tried to perform a citizen's arrest on his monkey ass, he attacked and tried to take the shotgun. His dumb nigger ass got shot. Everyone who protests that incident should be shot and burned in a fire, including race traitor morons like you.
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday July 04 2020, @11:51PM (7 children)
They have not won yet, but the menace to our lives is acute. As it was under the Republican nutcases of the 80s, it is under the Democrat nutcases of the 2020s.
(Score: 2, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday July 05 2020, @12:02AM (6 children)
We are just barely 6 months into the decade. Don't you think it would be good to at least see how this decade shapes up before pronouncing judgement?
(Score: 2, Insightful) by RandomFactor on Sunday July 05 2020, @12:41AM (5 children)
It's been a hell of a six months.
В «Правде» нет известий, в «Известиях» нет правды
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday July 05 2020, @03:51AM (4 children)
Indeed it has. But to my way of thinking the Democrats have been a relatively minor part of the problem. YMMV.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday July 05 2020, @09:19AM (1 child)
Are the instigators a minor part of the problem? Depends on the point of view.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday July 05 2020, @08:56PM
The Democrats bringing impeachment charges against Teh Rodonald? HOW DARE THEY?
(Score: 4, Insightful) by rleigh on Sunday July 05 2020, @10:47AM (1 child)
I'm British rather than American. But looking in the news at what's going down right now in Seattle, New York, and other Democrat-run cities, I'd have to say it looks like they are a very large part of the problem to me. They are failing to look out for the interests of the law abiding majority who pay their taxes and run businesses, work productively and live peacefully in favour of anarchists and minority interests, and are actively preventing the police from enforcing law and order in the face of rioting, looting, murder and lawlessness. It doesn't look like a recipe for success and quality of life, does it? Where are all the democrats shouting for an end to this, defending the police and calling for law and order. Deafening silence. They encouraged all of this. Actively and intentionally. Look at what the mayor of Seattle actively permitted and encouraged in the "CHOP"/"CHAZ" these past few weeks. An utter disgrace which is ending in tears, as could only be expected when you permit anarchists to rule several city blocks tooled up like warlords, shaking people down and dealing out arbitrary justice. Who was responsible for the health and safety of the residents and the businesses there? The Democrat city administrators, who let them down completely. Strange that it went from "peace and love" to "violent shithole" in just a few weeks... Well, not really, that's what anarchy gets you every time. Maintaining law and order is what we elect people for. I wonder if the individuals responsible will face legal action and justice for what they did here? As for New York, do they really want to turn once of the best cities on the planet into Detroit mk II?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday July 05 2020, @04:52PM
ISA/Socialist Alternative USA: Socialists Are Beating Jeff Bezos in Seattle (Again) [socialistalternative.org].
The Democratic Party left to its own devices gives us racialism and anarchism while the ruling class continues expropriating wealth at an astronomical rate from the working class. This of course sets the stage for the fascism that's taken root in the Republican Party. It takes socialists to show the way forward, and as it turns out, Democratic voters and even the filthy, pseudo-left DSA are receptive to it.
I see no mention of CHOP in there. Go figure. In another article, Socialist Alternative finally expressed some frustration with the lack of interest in organizing among that so-called "organized" protest. The whole business with the police precinct handily retreating and making way for CHOP just stinks. If I put my wswsws brand tinfoil on, I would not be surprised if the intelligence agencies are involved in CHOP: the tools of regime change come home to roost.
Anarchism is not the way forward. Anarchism has no capability of addressing the unfinished business of revolutions past. The choice is ever socialism or barbarism.
(Score: 2, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday July 05 2020, @01:24AM (13 children)
The Moral Majority never set neighborhoods on fire or have roving gangs.
They also didn't demand confessions of racial guilt just to go ahead and have you fired anyway. The best comparison for the current radicals is Communist revolutionaries.
(Score: 2, Interesting) by hemocyanin on Sunday July 05 2020, @03:42AM (11 children)
True. However, the Moral Majority (MM) did have more political power than the Regressive Left (RL) currently holds, though it's a close call I think. The RL definitely has corporate power (but why wouldn't they, the end of America would be the end of all regulations whether environmental for old industry, or cheap labor for new and old). Anyway, I will concede it can be argued that the RL is already worse than the MM, but I'm going to stay with them being equal for now. After the next round of elections, I expect the RL to be ascendant and America to quickly devolve into authoritarianism or rebellion. Both suck of course.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday July 05 2020, @04:48AM (10 children)
The optimistic view is that the left settles down after Biden is in office. A lot of the current trends can be traced back to the shock of 2016. Current madness in 2020 is in part payback for 2016 and the rest of the Trump presidency, a unique situation. But optimism is not in vogue.
(Score: 1, Insightful) by hemocyanin on Sunday July 05 2020, @09:21AM (8 children)
I don't see a reason to be optimistic. The ideological framework that caused Evergreen to erupt three years ago has metastasized thoroughly and I fear, this disease is not one from which we recover.
(Score: 0, Troll) by aristarchus on Sunday July 05 2020, @05:58PM (7 children)
Erupt? Kent State? None dead in Ore-gone? Hemo, you are a right-wing nut-job, prone to delusions and hyperbole! Could be early onset. Consult your physcian.
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday July 05 2020, @08:43PM
What? Haven't you heard? He used to be a total hippie liberal until the regressive left drove him into Trump's arms like a damsel in distress. /s cuz this site is inhabited by truly challenged people
(Score: 0, Flamebait) by hemocyanin on Sunday July 05 2020, @09:41PM (5 children)
Antifa has been attacking Portland court houses for 38 days straight with fire and low grade explosives ("commercial grade fireworks"). How do you define this? Peaceful protest?
(Score: 1, Offtopic) by aristarchus on Monday July 06 2020, @12:25AM (4 children)
Could be worse! Could be the Portland Police, with well known Proud Boy sympathies, putting their collective knee on the throat of the judicial system with a grant of qualified immunity.
(Score: 0, Offtopic) by hemocyanin on Monday July 06 2020, @12:42AM (3 children)
Snide snark does answer the question: what circumstance is one living through, when a violent group uses explosives to effect political change?
(Score: 1, Flamebait) by aristarchus on Monday July 06 2020, @12:53AM (2 children)
Pampered and cowardly American! Fireworks? Not even a pressure-cooker to produce some actual concussive force? Lucky for you that you never lived in Beruit, or Northern Ireland, or Iraq or Afghanistan, or Israel, or any place that had actual use of real explosives, instead of peaceful and colorful protests. You don't have to be a Weatherman to see that you are exaggerating. Must suck soooo much that you can't say " X lives matter!" without exposing yourself to the consequences of being a morally reprehensible person. You have my sympathy. Have you tried Prozac? Thorazine is probably a bit much, but in a pinch, till the Celebrations of American Independence are over, . . .
(Score: 1, Insightful) by hemocyanin on Monday July 06 2020, @01:18AM (1 child)
Understood. You seek to destroy America, otherwise you would not minimize how serious it is when armed groups, 100s to 1000s strong, fire deadly weapons at people and buildings.
(Score: 1, Offtopic) by aristarchus on Monday July 06 2020, @02:17AM
Well, not really an American, so whether it is destroyed or not seem to be American's business, except insofar as it affects the rest of the world. I have been constantly pointing out these armed groups who are attempting to overthrow your constitution, the 3%ers, the Oafkebblers, the Sagebrush Rebels, the neo-nazi alt right white supremacists, and the Republican party, and that St. Louis lawyer and his Karen, but seems no one wants to open their eyes, least of all you, hemotoma.
Now America, after WWII, had the opportunity to be a great nation. The Marshall Plan was a great thing. Of course, the reactionary approach to the recent allies, the Soviet Socialist Republics, was really a cock-up. But the US took the lead in establishing the United Nations, the International Court of Justice (after insisting, over the objections of the Brits, that a Tribunal be held to try Nazis, and make aggressive war a crime against humanity), and also demanded that former colonies of the European powers be given a path to independence, and entered into agreements with pacific nations assuring their eventual independence. America came to have the most respected system of Higher Education in the world, and the greatest intact industrial base, but also was responsible for great and significant advances in medicine, science, and technology. And after WWII, America finally undertook to deal with its own racist history, when Eisenhower ordered the US Military to integrate.
But now, not so much. America has pursued side-deals to keep its own war criminals out of the International Criminal Court, the permanent replacement for ad-hoc war crime tribunals. America has refused to sign off on the Kyoto Accords. America has repudiated a the Iranian non-proliferation agreement. And now America is leaving the World Health Organization. American is no longer the Shining City on the Hill, so much as a cut-rate cheap real-estate development on the Lower Eastside. So, seriously, from the point of view of the rest of the world, does not America deserve to be destroyed? No one complained all that much when its doppelganger, the USSR, fell under the weight of its own structural flaws. Why should it be different with America? I, though, still have hope that America can again stand for the ideals that are true American ideals, and none of this zenophobia, racism, and tiny-handed mismagament.
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday July 05 2020, @08:24PM
I'd like to imagine you're right, but this was cooking even while Obama was in office. Cancel culture was already starting to ramp up, you had dumb identity politics bullshit like 'clockboy' literally all the way to the whitehouse, and more.
And Biden is clearly entering into the mid (if not later) stages of dementia or Alzheimer's. Just look at the his coherence over the past year. It's not just a stutter - guy is clearly losing his mind. I have no idea who is going to be running the country if he wins, but it's not going to be him. Let's take an incredibly unstable country and put a guy in power who will almost certainly get 25th'd before his term is over. That's going to do great things.
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday July 05 2020, @07:13AM
No, they merely systematically infringed upon people's rights via legislation, which is much worse than individual acts of criminality.
But there are far more peaceful protestors than rioters to begin with, and all of this is a mere distraction from the much more severe systemic issues with the police.
(Score: 2) by coolgopher on Sunday July 05 2020, @01:11AM
And I don't get why they'd label female genitalia as cocks.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday July 05 2020, @02:52AM
Dude WTF. Those things do not belong in that kind of training set.
How widely used is this training set? Does also this explain that /b tard Microsoft AI? (The wonders of commercial software.)