Microsoft AI Fails to Distinguish Between Africans and Arabs, Writes Wrong News, Angers Celebrities

Prosopagnosia is also known as "facial recognition disorder", which is generally manifested as the inability to see other people's faces clearly or the loss of the ability to recognize other people's faces. Recently, Microsoft's AI editor also suffered from prosopagnosia and failed to distinguish between Arabs and Africans.

On May 28, Microsoft announced that it would lay off nearly 80 outsourced editors by the end of June, with AI to be responsible for the subsequent MSN news crawling, typesetting, and illustration tasks.

However, only one week after the announcement of the layoffs of human editors, the AI editor developed face blindness.In an article about singer Jade Thirlwall, the picture used was a photo of another member of the girl group, Leigh-Anne Pinnock..

Jade and Leigh are both members of the famous British girl group Little Mix. In this article, pop singer Jade shared her experience of racial discrimination.

When the AI was looking for matching pictures, it confused the black-skinned Leigh with the Arab-American Jade..

Leading the British girl group, winning many awards

Little Mix is a well-known British girl group formed in 2011 and consists of Jade Thirlwall, Perrie Edwards, Leigh-Anne Pinnock and Jesy Nelson.

The band is extremely well-known among the younger generation, and has won many international awards including the Global Awards Best Group and Best Song, the MTV Europe Music Awards Best British and Irish Artist, and has frequently appeared in many media reports. According to Wikipedia statistics, its albums and singles have sold more than 50 million copies worldwide.

Jade is one quarter Egyptian and one quarter Yemeni.is of mixed Arab descent, while Leigh is the only black woman on the team.

The person involved called out to MSN, can you please be more careful?

In response to the Microsoft AI's mistake in matching pictures, Jade publicly tagged @MSN on her Instagram Story to express her dissatisfaction.

“@MSN If you want to copy and paste articles from other accurate media, make sure you choose the right picture first.”

Jade also said that Leigh and herself were often mistaken for each other, which made her feel very uncomfortable. She even asked,Is it that difficult to correctly distinguish between two women of different skin colors in a band of only four people?

Microsoft AI editor makes mistakes right after taking office

According to The Guardian, as early as last month on the 28th and 29th, 50 Microsoft news producers were informed that their employment contracts would not be renewed after they expired on June 30th.

These people are "contract workers" hired through external agencies.In addition, 27 news editors of Britain's PA Media also received the same notice.

These contract editors are mainly responsible for maintaining the news homepage on the MSN website and Edge browser, conducting news review, position layout, replacing title images, etc.

A former employee revealed that in the next work, AI will replace these editorial functions, and full-time news producers directly employed by Microsoft will not be affected by this layoff.

Microsoft issued an urgent order: Keep a close eye on AI and don’t crawl all the articles

Afterwards, an official Microsoft spokesperson said that after the team discovered the AI image matching error, they immediately replaced the image and turned off the function.

At present, protests against racism are rising one after another in Europe and the United States.Singer Jade is one of the many stars who have expressed support for the BlackLivesMatter movement. 

The current situation also makes Microsoft very nervous, and it said Now is not the time to be making mistakes . However, AI bias has a long history, and there is currently no effective way to prevent it.

Given that all MSN news is captured by AI and none is original, The Guardian reported that Microsoft has issued a warning to the remaining human employees of MSN.Once it is discovered that AI automatically crawls negative reports about this image error, the corresponding articles need to be manually deleted as soon as possible.

Of course, even if an article is deleted manually, it is possible that AI will overrule the human editor’s decision and try to publish it again…

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