MIT pulls massive AI dataset over racist, misogynistic content

Fox News Flash top headlines are here. Check out what's clicking on Foxnews.com. The Massachusetts Institute of Technology permanently took down its 80 Million Tiny Images dataset--a popular image database used to train machine learning systems to identify people and objects in an environment--because it used a range of racist, misogynistic, and other offensive terms to label photos. In a letter published Monday to MIT's CSAIL website, the three creators of the huge dataset, Antonio Torralba, Rob Fergus, and Bill Freeman, apologized and said they had decided to take the dataset offline. "It has been brought to our attention that the Tiny Images dataset contains some derogatory terms as categories and offensive images. This was a consequence of the automated data collection procedure that relied on nouns from WordNet. We are greatly concerned by this and apologize to those who may have been affected," they wrote in the letter.