Big Tech builds AI with bad data. So scientists sought better data.

Yacine Jernite's fears about bias in artificial intelligence were vividly affirmed in 2017, when a Facebook translation error led Israeli police to arrest a Palestinian construction worker. The man had posted a picture of himself leaning against a bulldozer with the caption, in Arabic, "good morning." Facebook mistakenly translated it, in Hebrew, as "attack them." The error was quickly discovered and the man released, according to a report in Haaretz, but the incident cemented personal concerns about AI for Jernite, who joined Facebook's AI division soon after. As the child of Moroccan parents in post-9/11 America, Jernite said he has "spent hours upon hours in immigration secondary interviews -- in a way that I could not at the time trace to the technology that was being applied."