Facebook apologizes after its AI recommendation feature categorized a video of Black men as “about Primates”; Facebook disabled the feature and is investigating
Facebook called it “an unacceptable error.” The company has struggled with other issues related to race.
Facebook has disabled the AI recommendation feature entirely while it investigates, removing whatever engagement or distribution benefits that feature drove for the platform.
Facebook is publicly on the defensive again on race — the company's own framing ('an unacceptable error') acknowledges the harm to the users misclassified and the reputational cost amid its prior race-related apologies.
Second-order effects
Competitors building recommendation and computer-vision systems face renewed pressure to audit training data and classification outputs for racial bias before deployment, since the failure mode now has two high-profile precedents (Google Photos, Facebook).
Advertisers and content partners who rely on Facebook's automated categorization get another signal that AI-driven labeling can carry brand-safety risk, strengthening arguments for human review layers and bias testing as procurement requirements.
Third-order effects
If the pattern holds across Google (2015) and Facebook (2021), facial and person-classification systems may converge on a structural answer: suppressing sensitive person-level categories outright rather than attempting accurate ones — a de facto industry admission that these classifiers cannot yet be made reliably fair.
Repeated public failures give regulators and civil-rights groups concrete evidence for demanding algorithmic auditing requirements around automated decision systems that classify people by race-adjacent attributes.
The trend: Six years after Google Photos' 'gorillas' error, major platforms are still failing at classifying people without racial bias — pushing the industry toward disabling sensitive categories and inviting regulatory scrutiny of algorithmic bias.
And this is why I got stay reminding people that tech is racist by virtue of the conscious OR unconscious bias of the not diverse teams that create it. But they're sorry, they'll do better. https://twitter.com/...
As with ads/disinfo, I'd like to see the takeaway from stories like this, in addition to rightful anger, be that Facebook is a shitty technological product that relies on a kind of collective social delusion to take seriously https://twitter.com/...
If they were an ethical company, they would be proactively trying to break AI like this to make certain the bias isn't there and this doesn't happen. Instead once again, “Facebook shut off the feature and is investigating. It also apologized after we reached out.” - @RMac18 https…
This is what the AI-powered prompt looked like. The 3:30 minute video from the Daily Mail had nothing to do with “primates.” It was a set of two clips featuring Black men getting in altercations with a white male citizen and white police officers. https://www.nytimes.com/... http…
Don't turn on your “artificial intelligence-powered feature” if it can't pass this one fucking test. How are AI features still getting shipped if they can't pass the literal least they could do. https://twitter.com/...
The biggest tech co's have struggled with biases in AI. In 2015, Google Photos categorized Black people as “gorillas.” Six years later, Facebook, which has one of the largest repositories of photos on which to train its AI, is dealing w/ the same issue. https://www.nytimes.com/..…
Everyday we see the limits, biases and pure idiocy of relying solely on AI. And yet we continue to allow ourselves to be guinea pigs. @RMac18 with the latest. https://www.nytimes.com/...