Facebook has tendered its apology over its artificial intelligence glitch which classified black men as ‘primates’.
A newspaper video on Facebook featuring black men towards the end, asked Facebook users if they wanted to “keep seeing videos about primates”.
Speaking with BBC, Facebook described it as an unacceptable error, adding that investigations are being carried out. “We apologise to anyone who may have seen these offensive recommendations.”
Facebook created a new inclusive product council in 2020 to curb algorithms that exhibited racial bias. It further said that the primates recommendation was an algorithmic error and has nothing to do with the content of the video.
“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.”
“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.”
