Incident 14: Biased Sentiment Analysis
Entities
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Taxonomy DetailsFull Description
Google's Cloud Natural Language API returns "negative" sentiment analysis on phrases such as "I am homosexual" "I am Jewish" or "I am black". The API uses Natural Language Processing (NLP) to analyze text and produce a score from -1.0 to 1.0 with -1.0 being "very negative" and 1.0 being "very positive".
Short Description
Google Cloud's Natural Language API provided racist, homophobic, amd antisemitic sentiment analyses.
Severity
Negligible
Harm Distribution Basis
Race, Religion, Sexual orientation or gender identity, Ideology
Harm Type
Harm to social or political systems
AI System Description
Google Cloud's Natural Language API that analyzes input text and outputs a "sentiment analysis" score from -1.0 (very negative) to 1.0 (very positive)
System Developer
Sector of Deployment
Arts, entertainment and recreation
Relevant AI functions
Cognition
AI Techniques
Google Cloud Natural Language Processing API
AI Applications
Natural language processing
Location
Global
Named Entities
Google, Google Cloud, Natural Language API
Technology Purveyor
Beginning Date
10-2017T00:00:00.000Z
Ending Date
10-2017T00:00:00.000Z
Near Miss
Harm caused
Intent
Accident
Lives Lost
No
Data Inputs
input from open source internet
Incident Reports
Reports Timeline
- View the original report at its source
- View the report at the Internet Archive
Image: Shutterstock
Google messed up, and now says it's sorry.
Wednesday, Motherboard published a story written by Andrew Thompson about biases against ethnic and religious minorities encoded in one of Google's machine learning application …
- View the original report at its source
- View the report at the Internet Archive
GOOGLE'S artificial intelligence (AI) engine has been showing a negative bias towards words including "gay" and "jew".
The sentiment analysis process is the latest in a growing number of examples of "garbage in - garbage out" in the world o…
- View the original report at its source
- View the report at the Internet Archive
A Google spokesperson responded to Motherboard's request for comment and issued the following statement: "We dedicate a lot of efforts to making sure the NLP API avoids bias, but we don't always get it right. This is an example of one of th…
- View the original report at its source
- View the report at the Internet Archive
Google's code of conduct explicitly prohibits discrimination based on sexual orientation, race, religion, and a host of other protected categories. However, it seems that no one bothered to pass that information along to the company's artif…
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- View the report at the Internet Archive
The tool, which you can sample here, is designed to give companies a preview of how their language will be received. Entering whole sentences gives predictive analysis on each word as well as the statement as a whole. But you can see whethe…
- View the original report at its source
- View the report at the Internet Archive
A lot of major players in the science and technology scene believe we have a lot to fear from AI surpassing human intelligence, even as others laugh off those claims. But one thing both sides agree on is that artificial intelligence is subj…
- View the original report at its source
- View the report at the Internet Archive
Google developed its Cloud Natural Language API to allows the developers to work with language analyzer to reveal the actual meaning of the text. The system decided that whether the text was said in the positive sentiment or the negative. A…
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