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Meta apologises, says AI constantly learning as Karnataka CM flags translation flaw on Facebook
Siddaramaiah had said errors in Kannada translation were distorting facts and misleading the public, especially about official government communications
Meta, the company that owns Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp, on Thursday issued an apology over incorrect translation of Kannada into English on its platforms, after it was flagged by Chief Minister Siddaramaiah of Karnataka.
"We fixed an issue that briefly caused this inaccurate Kannada translation. We apologize that this happened," a Meta spokesperson said. And the company also communicated that “AI models, in this case our machine translation model, provided a machine translation error” on Facebook.
“We implemented a fix to ensure greater accuracy,” it said, adding that Meta is “continuously gathering feedback” to improve the technology generate "more accurate" information.
Earlier, Siddaramaiah cautioned that such errors were distorting facts and misleading the public, especially about official government communications. “Such negligence by tech giants can harm public understanding and trust,” he added,
His media advisor also wrote to Meta that many users may not realise they are reading an automated and flawed translation, mistaking it for the original message.
The state government had asked Meta to temporarily suspend the auto-translation feature for Kannada content until the system’s accuracy improves significantly.
The Meta statement did not address the possibility of any such suspension.
The Karnataka government had also asked the platform to collaborate with qualified Kannada language experts and linguistic professionals to enhance the quality and contextual accuracy of translations between Kannada and English.
