Facebook apologises for primate slur

FACEBOOK has issued a public apology to DailyMail.com and MailOnline for adding an AI-generated label of ‘primates’ to a news video that featured black men.

A Facebook spokesman admitted yesterday that the error was ‘unacceptable’, telling DailyMail.com: ‘We apologise to anyone who may have seen these offensive recommendations and to the Daily Mail for its content being subject to it.

‘This was an algorithmic error on Facebook and did not reflect the content of the Daily Mail’s post.’

At issue is a news video that the Mail posted to Facebook on June 27 last year, which depicted a white man appearing to harass a black man and calling the police on him.

Although the video had nothing to do with monkeys or other primates, Facebook’s AI-generated prompt asked viewers if they would like to ‘keep seeing videos about primates’, horrifying users of the social networking site.

Initially, Facebook failed to notify the Mail of its blunder when it was spotted by the New York Times, and the social media giant’s statement to the Times did not definitively specify that Facebook had added the offensive label to the Mail’s post. Facebook has now disabled the faulty recommendation algorithm.

‘This was clearly an unacceptable error on Facebook 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,’ a Facebook spokesman told DailyMail.com.

‘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.’

Facebook has been criticised in the past about its AI systems, and alleged bias.

Studies suggest facial recognition systems have more trouble identifying ethnic minorities, leading to incidents where black people have been discriminated against or arrested because of biased algorithms.