'I Lost Everything': California Photographer Blames AI Bias for Instagram Ban | KQED
'I Lost Everything': California Photographer Blames AI Bias for Instagram Ban | KQED
An LA-based photographer says his Instagram account that documents 1980s cholo and African American street culture has been banned repeatedly due to racial bias.
When a machine moderates content, it evaluates text and images as data using an algorithm that has been trained on existing data sets. The process for selecting training data has come under fire as it’s been shown to have racial, gender and other biases.
The problem isn't AI itself, it's that comapies are willing to do that and then fire any customer support or human you could ever talk to. They let their automod ruin people's lives and accounts, then barricade themselves, impossible to reach.
Similarly, applications processes, school to employment.
ENTRY LEVEL POSITION [Insert job title]
Requirements:
- 10+ Years in a similar environment
- 2+ Years of management experience
or
You apply and literally never get any form of anything back besides a confirmation email "thanks". That was the absolute most annoying, demoralizing shit when I was searching for a job post school. I tumbled around 2 contract positions and finally have landed somewhere that I love, but fuck me was it hard on me mentally to keep farming out applications for basically a year, and hear back (I dont care if its a no, i just want some form of an answer!) less than 2% of the time
Why let a company be in a position to ruin ur life in the first place? It's like putting ur balls in a Crocs mouth.
Well, it's kinda what society forces us to do. There's not exactly much of an alternative to interacting with companies for most things.
Whether it's you livelihood, you home, your car, insurance, whatever
Don't kink shame!
Exactly. The real problem is lack of human oversight, and lack of a way to contact someone.
And these days, even if you manage to get someone they'll be some call center in India or Philippines that are only there to help with faq-level things and otherwise politely tell you to fuck off. They can't actually do anything.
It's been shown over and over again for the last two decades that you can't build a reliable archive on platforms outside of your control. Stuff like Instagram can be useful for trying to draw traffic to your own platform - but you always should treat those platforms as throwaway content.
I came here to say exactly this. IG and all the others are private companies, with their own terms and conditions one agrees on, and also agrees those terms can be changed by them at any time. Moderation of content is part of it. Deal with it, or don't use them at all.
Having largely undisclosed and privately owned platforms and algorithms dictate and decide our cultural exchange, spread of news, topics of discourse and other societally important interactions is such a horrible idea. I wish this was more obvious to the public so governments would end this. It divides sociaties, poisons public discourse and skews it with racist biases and towards hatred.
This just reminded me that I need to delete my instagram account.
EDIT: all done.
Another strong argument for the fediverse.
An important point, buried deeply in the article :
She said she has observed differential treatment across the social media platform, depending on the race of the subject in the image in question or who posted it.
“We’ve seen this time and again, Meta taking down content by and about people of color,” she said. “While similar content by and about white people remains up.”
Diversify.
The Instagram account is back now. I'm still banning Meta though.
>FAGMAN trains ai to ban content about criminal gang activity
>FAGMAN ai bans journalist documenting criminal gang activity without regards to context because it is a machine
I'm gonna have to say that the ai is correct here. Rather it's the entire approach to "content safety" that's wrong.
Only it leaves pictures of the Hell’s Angels alone. Clearly there’s an issue here.
That's not just Hell's Angels. It's also Pagans and Outlaws.
More than one person got killed at that party.
Unfortunately those are not platforms meant for archiving, it's in their own TOS they can take down any content or entire accounts at their own will and for undisclosed reasons. Also those platforms are subject to shitty practices like report abusing, yet another reason to put your content in danger.
Also unfortunately they are very attractive because of the influence a person can build with large network of followers in those platforms and how they can leverage that.
I don't see a plausible solution or alternative. Instagram, Facebook, are the platform of the masses and where your content has the highest exposure. People today aren't browsing "the web" like we used to back then. Instagram/Facebook are the internet.
Everything I don't like is racism
Please explain why their photos were taken down but photos of the Hell’s Angels were allowed to stay up.