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Comment by exporectomy | Hacker News Reader

That's not how language works. We're also all animals but not animals at the same time. Context and culture affect the meaning of words.

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I read the comment in a different way: We are all literally primates. Humans and apes share a lot of physical characteristics. It's not odd that an AI would confuse humans with primates, it's just unfortunate.

Parent's point is not irrelevant though, did the AI label only people of one specific racial background as primates?

The article doesn't really provide any details as it's only a few lines long.

The word "primate" in itself is not a slur but it can be used as a slur, as you said, depending on the context, however not much context was given in the article.

That's interesting. It may have done the same with white people the same amount but nobody called the BBC to whine, or the BBC didn't care about that.

If it had tagged all humans in all photos as primates; this wouldn't be newsworthy- but it didn’t do that. It only tagged black people. Which if you can empathise with others, is understandably offensive.

> but it didn’t do that. It only tagged black people

Do you have a source for that? I couldn't find this in the article but maybe I missed it.

There was a discussion of this in a sibling thread with more context.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28416909

But the sibling thread doesn't seem to have additional sources. My point was that this BBC article we are discussing leaves a lot to interpretation and I wish it was more informative.

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