[root_axis]

> it embarrassing or an expected mistake to be learned from.

I would say it's both. It's embarrassing for Facebook because it looks racist even though it really isn't. The system might be emotionless but the people who interact with it aren't, and we don't expect them to be.

[crooked-v]

> it looks racist even though it really isn't

It absolutely is racist. Racist outcomes are still racist regardless of whether there's a guy in Klansmen robes at the steering wheel or not.

[saltyfamiliar]

How is it a racist outcome? This has nothing to do with the belief that one "race" is inherently better than another. It's a simple categorization error due to insufficient training data.

[crooked-v]

It's a racist outcome because racists have a long history of comparing black people to primates, and because this results in a service that's actively worse and less useful for black people than those of other ethnicities.

Also, a 'simple error' performed by company with absurd amounts of money and several extremely public examples from its peer companies as to what not to do is, at that point, more negligence than anything.

[root_axis]

> Racist outcomes are still racist regardless of whether there's a guy in Klansmen robes at the steering wheel or not.

Yes, I understand what systemic racism and implicit bias are, your condescending snark is appreciated.

Anyway, it's not racist because the result is not the product of implicit bias or systemic racism, it's a software bug that would have been possible no matter who was working on this software. As I wrote in another comment: the whole point of ML is to adapt to what is effectively an unbounded set of inputs, pretty much by definition there will be cases where even a team of 100% black people will train a model that, given the correct input, will fail in ways that particularly affect black people.