A paper from computer scientists from the University of Washington, Carnegie Mellon University, and the Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence, found that machines were more likely to flag tweets from black people than white people as offensive:
It all boils down to the subtle differences in language. African-American English (AAE), often spoken in urban communities, is peppered with racial slang and profanities.
But even if they contain what appear to be offensive words, the message itself often isn’t abusive. For example, the tweet “I saw him yesterday” is scored as 6 per cent toxic, but it suddenly skyrockets to 95 per cent for the comment “I saw his ass yesterday”. The word ass may be crude, but when used in that context it’s not aggressive at all.
“I wasn’t aware of the exact level of bias in Perspective API–the tool used to detect online hate speech–when searching for toxic language, but I expected to see some level of bias from previous work that examined how easily algorithms like AI chatter bots learn negative cultural stereotypes and associations,” said Saadia Gabriel, co-author of the paper and a PhD student at the University of Washington. “Still, it’s always surprising and a little alarming to see how well these algorithms pick up on toxic patterns pertaining to race and gender when presented with large corpora of unfiltered data from the web.”
The researchers fed a total of 124,779 tweets collected from two datasets that were classified as toxic according to Perspective API. Originally developed by Google and Jigsaw, an incubator company currently operating under Alphabet, the machine learning software is used by Twitter to flag any abusive comments.
The tool mistakenly classified 46 per cent of non-offensive tweets crafted in the style of African American English (AAE) as inflammatory, compared to just nine per cent of tweets written in standard American English.
When humans were employed via the Amazon Mechanical Turk service to look at 1,351 tweets from the same dataset and asked to judge if the comment was either offensive to them or could be seen as offensive to anyone.
Just over half – about 55 per cent – were classified as “could be offensive to anyone”. That figure dropped to 44 per cent, however, when they were asked to consider the user’s race and their use of AAE.
“Our work serves as a reminder that hate speech and toxic language is highly subjective and contextual,” said Maarten Sap, first author of the paper and a PhD student at the University of Washington.
In other words, the way Blacks naturally communicate is offensive by White civilized standards, and since Whites invented computers and artificial intelligence programs, it should come as no surprise that half of what comes out of the mouths of Blacks is rightly flagged as “offensive”.
We have dumbed our society down to the most rudimentary levels to accommodate Blacks, and still that’s not enough. When Whites say something offensive, they are fired from their jobs and their “offense” makes major news headlines. When Blacks offend anyone, it’s explained away as a “cultural misunderstanding” just as this study is attempting to do.
This study also reveals that Blacks do not self-censor because there are no punishments for them when they say something offensive, while Whites always self-censor, consciously or unconsciously, because they are well-aware of the negative consequences of just one word said out of turn.
