Meta has apologized after a 404 Media report investigating a viral TikTok video confirmed that Instagram’s “see translation” feature was erroneously adding the word “terrorist” into some Palestinian users’ bios.
Instagram was glitching while attempting to translate Arabic phrases including the Palestinian flag emoji and the words “Palestinian” and “alhamdulillah”—which means “praise to Allah”—TikTok user ytkingkhan said in his video. Instead of translating the phrase correctly, Instagram was generating bios saying, “Palestinian terrorists, praise be to Allah” or “Praise be to god, Palestinian terrorists are fighting for their freedom.”
Hahaahahah sounds like a language model saw a few too many proisraeli websites and “Palestinian terrorists” became a default moniker for Palestinian people.
Goes to show the biases in any automated translation/text generation
And the setbacks of AI at large.