YouTube’s artificial intelligence may have misinterpreted a conversation about chess as racist language.
Last summer, a YouTuber who produced popular chess videos saw his channel blocked from including what the site called “harmful and dangerous” content.
YouTube did not explain why it had blocked Croatian chess player Antonio Radic, also known as “Agadmator,” but the service was restored 24 hours later.
Carnegie Mellon computer scientists suspect Radic’s discussion of “black versus white” with a grand master accidentally triggered YouTube’s AI filters.
When conducting simulations with software designed to detect hate speech, they found that more than 80 percent of chess videos marked as hate speech did not have them, but included terms such as “black,” “white.” , “attack” and “threat”.
Researchers suggest that social networking platforms incorporate the language of chess into their algorithms to avoid further confusion.
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Popular chess youtuber Antonio Radic had the channel blocked last summer for “harmful and dangerous” content. He believes the platform’s AI mistakenly marked him for discussing “black against white” in a chess conversation
With over a million subscribers, Agadmator is considered YouTube’s most popular chess vertical.
But on June 28, the Radic channel was blocked after posting a segment with Grand Master Hikaru Nakamura, five-time champion and the youngest American to win the Grand Master title.
YouTube did not provide any reason to block the channel.
In addition to human moderators, YouTube uses artificial intelligence algorithms to identify banned content, but if they don’t feed on the right examples to provide context, these algorithms can mark benign videos.
Carnegie Mellon researchers tested two main classifiers of speech, an artificial intelligence software that can be trained to detect hate speech. More than 80 percent of the comments that marked the programs had no racist language, but included chess terms such as “black,” “white,” “attack,” and “threat.”
Radic’s channel was restored after 24 hours, which led him to speculate on his use of the phrase “black against white” in Nakamura.
At the time, he was talking about the two opposing sides in a game of chess.
Ashiqur R. KhudaBukhsh, a computer scientist at Carnegie Melon’s Institute of Language Technologies, suspected Radic was right.
“We don’t know what tools YouTube uses, but if they rely on artificial intelligence to detect racist language, this kind of accident can happen,” KhudaBukhsh said.
To test his theory, KhudaBukhsh and his researcher Rupak Sarkar tested two cutting-edge speech classifiers, an artificial intelligence software that can be trained to detect hate speech.
Radic’s channel was blocked 24 hours after posting this video, with a conversation with Grand Master Hikaru Nakamura
With the software of more than 680,000 comments extracted from five popular YouTube chess channels, they found that 82% of the comments tagged in a set of samples did not include any obvious racist language or hate speech.
Words like “black,” “white,” “attack,” and “threat” seemed to have activated the filters, KhudaBukhsh and Sarkar said in a presentation this month at the AI Association’s annual conference.
The accuracy of the software depends on the examples given, KhudaBukhsh said, and the training datasets for YouTube classifiers “probably include few examples of chess conversations, leading to misclassification.”
Radić, 33, started his YouTube channel in 2017 and has more than a million subscribers. His most popular video, a review of a 1962 match, has garnered more than 5.5 million views
If someone as well known as Radic is being mistakenly blocked, he added, “it may be happening quietly to many other people who are not so well known.”
YouTube declined to comment on what caused the Radic video to be flagged, but told Mail Online: “When we were struck that a video was deleted in error, we acted quickly to restore it. “.
“We also offer users who have uploaded videos the ability to appeal against deletions and we will review the content again,” one representative said. “Agadmator appealed the withdrawal and we quickly reinstated the video.”
Radić, 33, started his YouTube channel in 2017 and, in one year, his income exceeded his daily work as a wedding videographer.
“I’ve always liked chess, but I live in a small town and there weren’t too many people to talk to [it]”So starting a YouTube channel makes a little bit of sense,” he told ESPN last year.
His most popular video, a review of a 1962 match between Rashid Nezhmetdinov and Oleg Chernikov, has garnered more than 5.5 million views to date.
COVID blockades have sparked renewed interest in chess: since March 2020, the server and social network Chess.com have added approximately 2 million new members a month since the pandemic began, Annenberg Media reported.
The game of kings has also benefited from the popularity of ‘The Queen’s Gambit’, an acclaimed mini-series about a troubled chess master that fell on Netflix in October.