{"id":200857,"date":"2021-03-12T22:37:55","date_gmt":"2021-03-12T19:37:55","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/en.buradabiliyorum.com\/facebook-ai-boss-yann-lecun-goes-off-in-twitter-rant-blames-talk-radio-for-hate-content\/"},"modified":"2021-03-12T22:37:55","modified_gmt":"2021-03-12T19:37:55","slug":"facebook-ai-boss-yann-lecun-goes-off-in-twitter-rant-blames-talk-radio-for-hate-content","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/facebook-ai-boss-yann-lecun-goes-off-in-twitter-rant-blames-talk-radio-for-hate-content\/","title":{"rendered":"#Facebook AI boss Yann LeCun goes off in Twitter rant, blames talk radio for hate content"},"content":{"rendered":"

“#Facebook<\/a> AI boss Yann LeCun goes off in Twitter rant, blames talk radio for hate content<\/strong>”<\/p>\n

\n Yann LeCun, Facebook\u2019s world-renowned AI guru, had some problems with an article written about his company yesterday. So he did what any of us would do, he went on social media to air his grievances.<\/p>\n

Only, he didn\u2019t take the fight to Facebook as you\u2019d expect. Instead, over a period of hours, he engaged in a back-and-forth with numerous people on Twitter.<\/p>\n

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No it doesn’t.
App<\/a>arently, one can write about AI fairness without paying attention to journalistic fairness.
One of those cases where one knows the reality, reads an article about it, and go “WTF?”<\/p>\n

\u2014 Yann LeCun (@ylecun) March 12, 2021<\/a>\n<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Can we just stop for a moment and appreciate that, on a random Thursday in March, the father of Facebook\u2019s AI program gets on Twitter<\/i> to argue about a piece from journalist Karen Hao, an AI reporter for MIT\u2019s Technology<\/a> Review?<\/span><\/p>\n

Hao wrote an incredible long-form feature<\/a> on Facebook\u2019s content moderation problem. The piece is called \u201cHow Facebook got addicted to spreading misinformation,\u201d and the sub-heading is a doozy:<\/span><\/p>\n

The company\u2019s AI algorithms gave it an insatiable habit for lies and hate speech. Now the man who built them can\u2019t fix the problem.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

I\u2019ll quote just a single paragraph from Hao\u2019s article here that captures its essence:<\/span><\/p>\n

Everything the company does and chooses not to do flows from a single motivation: Zuckerberg\u2019s relentless desire for growth \u2026 [Facebook AI lead Joaquin Qui\u00f1onero Candela\u2019s] AI expertise supercharged that growth. His team got pigeonholed into targeting AI bias, as I learned in my reporting, because preventing such bias helps the company avoid proposed regulation that might, if passed, hamper that growth. Facebook leadership has also repeatedly weakened or halted many initiatives meant to clean up misinformation on the platform because doing so would undermine that growth.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

There\u2019s a lot to unpack there, but the gist is that Facebook is driven by the singular goal of \u201cgrowth.\u201d\u00a0The same could be said of cancer.<\/p>\n

LeCun, apparently, didn\u2019t like the article. He hopped on the app that Jack built and shared his thoughts, including what appears to be personal attacks questioning Hao\u2019s journalistic integrity:<\/p>\n

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Yes, that’s why your piece was a surprise to me and to many of my colleagues.<\/p>\n

From my point of view, you piece is full of factual errors and incorrect assumptions of ill intent.<\/p>\n

What happened to you?<\/p>\n

\u2014 Yann LeCun (@ylecun) March 12, 2021<\/a>\n<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

His umbrage yesterday extended to blaming talk radio and journalism for his company\u2019s woes:<\/p>\n

\n

More importantly, increased polarization is a uniquely American phenomenon (which started before FB was around)
Many other countries have seen polarization *decrease* in the last decade. And they use FB just as much.
I blame cable news<\/a> and talk radio.<\/p>\n

\u2014 Yann LeCun (@ylecun) March 12, 2021<\/a>\n<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Really Yann? Increased polarization via disinformation is uniquely American? Have you met my friend \u201cthe reason why every single war ever has been fought in the history of ever?\u201d<\/p>\n

I digress.<\/p>\n

This wouldn\u2019t be the first time he\u2019s taken to Twitter to argue in defense of his company, but there was more going on yesterday than meets the eye. LeCun\u2019s tirade began with a tweet announcing new research<\/a>\u00a0on fairness from the Facebook Artificial Intelligence Team (FAIR).<\/p>\n

According to Hao, Facebook coordinated the release of the paper to coincide with the Tech Review article:<\/p>\n

\n

People have been asking: did FB publish this in response to your story? No, let me clarify. They wanted this paper to be in my story & gave me an early draft. Then in anticipation of it being in my story, they timed its publication with my piece, hoping the two would complement. https:\/\/t.co\/pST8LYsTmG<\/a><\/p>\n

\u2014 Karen Hao (@_KarenHao) March 11, 2021<\/a>\n<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Based on the evidence, it appears Facebook was absolutely gobsmacked by Hao\u2019s reporting. It seems the social network was expecting a feature on the progress its made in shoring up its algorithms, detecting bias, and combating hate speech. Instead, Hao laid bare the essential problem with Facebook: it\u2019s a spider web.<\/p>\n

Those are my words, not Hao\u2019s. What they wrote was:<\/p>\n

Near the end of our hour-long interview \u2026 [Qui\u00f1onero] began to emphasize that AI was often unfairly painted as \u201cthe culprit.\u201d Regardless of whether Facebook used AI or not, he said, people would still spew lies and hate speech, and that content would still spread across the platform.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

If I were to rephrase that for impact, I might say something like \u201cregardless whether our company pours gasoline on the ground and offers everyone a book of matches, we\u2019re still going to have forest fires.\u201d But, again, those are my words.<\/p>\n

And when I say that Facebook is a spiderweb, what I mean is: spiderwebs are good, until they become too far-reaching. For example, if you see a spiderweb in the corner of your barn, that\u2019s great! It means you\u2019ve got a little arachnid warrior helping you keep nastier bugs out. But if you see a spiderweb covering your entire city, like something out of \u201cKingdom of the Spiders,\u201d that\u2019s a really bad thing.<\/p>\n

\"Kingdom
<\/a>William Shatner was in this movie!<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

And it\u2019s evident that LeCun knows this because his entire Twitter spiel yesterday was just one giant admission that Facebook is beyond anyone\u2019s control. Here\u2019s a few tidbits from his tweets on the subject:<\/p>\n

\n\u2026 When it became clear that such things were happening, FB took corrective [measures] quickly\u2026..<\/p>\n

certainly not quickly enough to prevent some bad things from happening in the meantime (hence those UN reports).<\/p>\n

But taking those corrective measure is neither instantaneous, nor easy, nor cheap\u2026.<\/p>\n

When the Myanmar gov started disseminating hateful disinfo against Rohingyas, FB took down their sock-puppet accounts, and hired Burmese-speaking moderators\u2026.<\/p>\n

But the volume was such that AI systems had to be developed to automate is as much as possible.<\/p>\n

So FB developed the world\u2019s best Burmese-English translation system, so that Eng-speaking moderator could help\u2026.<\/p>\n

Simultaneously, it developed hateful and violent speech detectors for Burmese. But data was scarce.<\/p>\n

So in the last 2 years, FB developed multilingual systems that can detect hate speech in any language and don\u2019t require lots of training data.<\/p>\n

This all takes expertise, time, money, and in this case, the latest AI breakthroughs.\n<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Interesting. LeCun\u2019s core assertion seems to be that stopping misinformation is really hard<\/em>. Well, that\u2019s true. There are a lot of things that are really hard that we haven\u2019t figured out.<\/p>\n

As my colleague Matthew Beedham pointed out in today\u2019s Shift newsletter<\/a>, building a production automobile that\u2019s fueled by a nuclear reactor in its trunk<\/a> is really hard.<\/p>\n

But, as the scientists working on exactly that for the Ford company realized decades ago,\u00a0nuclear technology simply isn\u2019t advanced enough to make it safe enough to power consumer production vehicles. Nuclear\u2019s great for aircraft carriers and submarines, but not so much for the family station wagon.<\/p>\n

I\u2019d argue that Facebook\u2019s impact on humanity is almost certainly far, far more detrimental and wide-reaching than a measly little nuclear meltdown in the trunk of a Ford Mustang. After all, only 31 people died as a direct result of the Chernobyl nuclear meltdown and experts figure<\/a> a max of around 4,000 were indirectly affected (health-wise, anyway).<\/p>\n

Facebook has 2.45 billion users. And every time its platform creates or exacerbates a problem for one of those users, its answer is one version or another of \u201cwe\u2019ll look into it.\u201d The only place this kind of reactionary response to technology imbalance actually serves the public is in a Whac-A-Mole game<\/a>.
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