According to a study named, “‘Beach to bitch: Inadvertent Unsafe Transcription of Kids Content on YouTube”, it is found that 7,013 videos from 24 major YouTube channels contained inappropriate words.
Ashique KhudaBukhsh, assistant professor from Rochester Institute of Technology’s software engineering department says, “highly inappropriate taboo words” are contained in ten percent of the videos.
How will parents have surveillance over the videos that their kids watch when it is perceptible to be manipulated by AI?
How Does It Work?
In children’s YouTube videos, the Amazon Transcribe and Google Speech-To-Text use a speech recognition system (ASR) to put subtitles that are age-inappropriate.
In YouTube videos, Google Speech-To-Text automatically translates the videos, the closed captions you see on your tab. But sometimes due to AI malfunction, the word “beach” would come as “bitch”, or “I love corn” would be mistaken for “I love porn”.
Channels with millions of views from Barbie to Ryan’s world or Fun Kids had an inappropriate content hallucination. Inappropriate content will further lead young children to be in dangerous situations and impact them mentally.
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AI Misappropriation
The researchers KhudaBukhsh, Sumeet Kumar, and Krithika Ramesh said, “We were mind-boggled because we knew that these channels were watched by millions of children. We understand this is an important problem because it is telling us that the inappropriate content may not be present in the source but it can be introduced by a downstream AI (Artificial Intelligence) application.”
They added, “So on the broader philosophical level, people generally have checks and balances for the source, but now we have to be more vigilant about having checks and balances if an AI application modifies the source. It can inadvertently introduce inappropriate content.”
In many videos, the English language subtitles are not applicable in YouTube Kids App, which influences the children to watch videos on the YouTube app.
The study says, “It is unclear how often kids are only confined to the YouTube Kids app while watching videos and how frequently parents (or guardians) simply let them watch kids’ content from general YouTube. Our findings indicate a need for tighter integration between YouTube general and YouTube kids to be more vigilant about kids’ safety,”
What Is The Solution?
KhudaBukhsh said the main reason these errors happen is that the ASR systems are based more on the speech connotations of adults. He says, “We can have a human in the loop to check on transcription errors. We can have someone watch and manually confirm if it is there in the video or not.”
Besides the tech advancements and management, the parents need to be constantly on alert on what their children consume on the internet. The non-restrictive availability of a wide range of resources in the digital medium is both a boon and bane. The children should be protected against negative consumption. When they are older they will have their own will.
Disclaimer: This article is fact-checked
Image Credits: Google Photos
Feature Image designed by Saudamini Seth
Source: The Indian Express & Forbes
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This post is tagged under: kids videos, YouTube Kids, YouTube, cartoons, games, children, inappropriate words, cussing, digital media, parents control, video games, AI, Google speech
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