Incident 144: YouTube's AI Mistakenly Banned Chess Channel over Chess Language Misinterpretation

Description: YouTube's AI-powered hate speech detection system falsely flagged chess content and banned chess creators allegedly due to its misinterpretation of strategy language such as "black," "white," and "attack" as harmful and dangerous.

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Alleged: YouTube developed and deployed an AI system, which harmed Antonio Radic , YouTube chess content creators and YouTube users.

Incident Stats

Incident ID
144
Report Count
6
Incident Date
2020-06-28
Editors
Sean McGregor, Khoa Lam

GMF Taxonomy Classifications

Taxonomy Details

Known AI Goal

Hate Speech Detection

Known AI Technology

Classification, Distributional Learning

Known AI Technical Failure

Distributional Bias

AI mistakes ‘black and white’ chess chat for racism
independent.co.uk · 2021

Online discussions about black and white chess pieces are confusing artificial intelligence algorithms trained to detect racism and other hate speech, according to new research.

Computer scientists at Carnegie Mellon University began invest…

YouTube algorithm accidentally blocks 'black v white' CHESS strategy
dailymail.co.uk · 2021

YouTube's overeager AI might have misinterpreted a conversation about chess as racist language.

Last summer, a YouTuber who produces popular chess videos saw his channel blocked for including what the site called 'harmful and dangerous' con…

AI May Mistake Chess Discussions as Racist Talk
cmu.edu · 2021

"The Queen's Gambit," the recent TV mini-series about a chess master, may have stirred increased interest in chess, but a word to the wise: social media talk about game-piece colors could lead to misunderstandings, at least for hate-speech …

YouTube AI Misinterprets Chess Chat Involving 'Black' And 'White' Pieces, Flags for Racism
techtimes.com · 2021

It might be unbelievable at first that a YouTube algorithm has detected a chess discussion as 'racist' and flagged it for punishment. In the case of the chess YouTuber, he was blocked by the video-streaming company for the alleged, sensitiv…

YouTube AI blocks chess channel after mistaking 'black v white' discussion as racism
tribune.com.pk · 2021

The world’s most popular YouTube chess channel was blocked after artificial algorithms set up to detect racist content and hate speech mistook discussion about black and white chess pieces as racism, reports Independent UK.

On June 28, 2020…

Why a YouTube Chat About Chess Got Flagged for Hate Speech
wired.com · 2021

Last June, Antonio Radić, the host of a YouTube chess channel with more than a million subscribers, was live-streaming an interview with the grandmaster Hikaru Nakamura when the broadcast suddenly cut out.

Instead of a lively discussion abo…

Variants

A "variant" is an incident that shares the same causative factors, produces similar harms, and involves the same intelligent systems as a known AI incident. Rather than index variants as entirely separate incidents, we list variations of incidents under the first similar incident submitted to the database. Unlike other submission types to the incident database, variants are not required to have reporting in evidence external to the Incident Database. Learn more from the research paper.

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