Facebook's auto translation AI fail leads to a nightmare for a Palestinian man

Bad translations often make good comedy, but in the case of this Palestinian man, they marked the start of a nightmare.

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Israeli police arrested the man, a construction worker in a West Bank settlement near Jerusalem, after he posted on Facebook a picture of himself leaning against a bulldozer with the caption reading "يصبحهم" or "Good Morning" in Arabic.

Facebook's automatic translation service, which uses its own AI system, translated the post into "attack them" in Hebrew, or "hurt them" in English:

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For this reason, the Israeli Judea and Samaria District police detained the man ad questioned him for several hours on suspicion he's going to use the bulldozer for a hit-and-run attack, according to Haaretz.

During this whole process, no Arabic speaker was consulted to double-check on the Facebook's automatic translation.

After realising their mistake, police released the man, Haaretz reported.

Facebook told Mashable it was looking into the issue. In a statement to Gizmodo, Facebook's engineering manager Necip Fazil Ayan said:

"Unfortunately, our translation systems made an error last week that misinterpreted what this individual posted. Even though our translations are getting better each day, mistakes like these might happen from time to time and we’ve taken steps to address this particular issue. We apologize to him and his family for the mistake and the disruption this caused."

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