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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: 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.