Silly Google's Photos app labelled black people as gorillas Google's new Photos software automatically labelled images of black people as "gorillas". The ad giant has since apologised. Mountain View's hugely embarrassing blunder comes just one month after it launched its cloud-hosted photo storage service, and made a big deal out of its machine-learning features. Google also warned …
It is not half baked. It probably works as it should in 99.9999% of the time. however, when you have hundreds of millions of users, that still means hundreds of cases that are wrong.
It's like saying Google Maps is half baked because there is a street that is missing in your town. It's still damn useful.
The whole point of machine learning software is that it gets fed input, does a classification and generates output.
The software is not broken, it just has not been fed with good data. It clearly needs more black people in its learning set so it can tell the difference between a gorilla and a black person. This is no different from the recent NSFW classification by, IIRC, FB that classified pictures of girly bits as butterflies.
But no, the numpties think there's racist software that goes
if (image_property.black_face) printf("gorilla.\n");
These classifications come from what people type in. As black people can call other black people "nigger" without the PC alarms going off, we'll also see these classification engines generate outputs like "nigger", "bro"... and no doubt the technically illiterate will think Google added more code that says
if (image_property.black_face) printf("nigger");
I think it goes back further than the web... many companies figured the risk assessment and decided to let their customers/users do their testing. It's just taken the software companies time to figure out how in-house testing affects the bottom line. The difference is that generally software won't kill or maim people compared to say a car or other piece of equipment.
"However, the question has to be asked: why did Google release such a half-baked app for showtime in the first place?"
Come on Kelly you've been in IT journalism for long enough to know the answer to that question. Everything Google does is a half baked "beta" that may be cancelled at any time and with minimum notice, even services that no longer have the beta tag like GMail.
"How do you define an algorithm to describe a chair, something to sit on. Is that algorithm good enough to correctly distinguish a dining table chair, a stool, sofa, a park bench?"
That's a good question. And what's particularly interesting is that scientists do not even know how the human mind is able to distinguish the incredible variety of things that are subsumed under the heading "chairs".
Because intelligence of any sort, artificial or otherwise, is hard.
Question : Why is being called a Gorilla an insult ? What's wrong with Gorillas ?
And the AI appeared to do a reasonable job in identifiying that the iamge was indeed an animal, with a black face, eyes mouth and nose.... The mistake was just the type of animal..
So everyone decides that this should be treated as racist, or as an insult, cmon folks, the problem lies with the meatbags not with the AI.
Unintentional from an AI standpoint...
Yup, the important bit about an insult is the intent. A "perceived insult" isn't actually an insult at all, just a misunderstanding.
Trouble is that the legal system tends to reward people for acting pigshit-thick and misunderstanding as much as possible.
In the absence of the context of the treatment of those of African origin - you would be quite right to point out elements of faux-outrage, or victim identification.
But as they were often portrayed as animals/less than human, there is good reason that it may make some bridle at the inadvertent linking.
Yes, AI is hard. Google excels at coming up with fast and useful answers to questions of nearly impossible scale. It's in their designs, their software, and their mentality. As a result, Googlers have trouble comprehending situations where one imperfect answer may have dire consequences.
Many of the above comments are in direct correlation to what I initially wrote.. The problem is with the meatbags not the AI.
The AI has no concept of "insult", it did not intentionally create this situation. The AI analysed an image and found a match for what is characterises as a Gorilla, nothing racial here..
The only time that it becomes a racial problem is when the PC start shouting, because up until that point it was , and is, just a computer algorithm trying to determine the real-world equivalant object from a bitmap.
By reading anything more into it than that should really make you should think about your own mind's processes..
Unless of course certain amongst the El Reg forum believe in a more biblical approach to evolution.....I can hear Darwin sobbing to himself with his face cupped in his hands...
My daughter reached the linguistic ability of being able to put adjectives and nouns together quite early on, but her speech was somewhat indistinct. "White car" sounded more like "Whan Car"... which she shouted very loudly whilst pointing at at a passing BMW with windows wound down, lowered suspension, trailing "aromatic" smoke like a Pacific 4-6-2 and at an gap between tracks 19 and 20 of the album "Murder Junkies" that had been pounding out of the ICE as it approached... one can only be grateful that the driver was probably momentarily suffering hearing loss as a result of the incredible volume.
Genius. I once blagged a ticket for a Liverpool-Fulham football match, separated from my friend and in a stand with the opposing Fulham supporters. Liverpool won 2-0, met with much hurling of obscenities by those around me, including the man next to me who was with his son (I know, great example!). At the end, this lad, probably about 7 yrs old, turned to his Dad, and pointing to me, says "he's not made a sound for 90 minutes, do you think he's a Liverpool fan?" His Dad said something like "No, don't be silly, be quiet", and I just thought was that he was one of the most observant people there. I wanted to tell his Dad, but chickened out!
Why 2 year old likes watching Play Doh videos on YouTube (don't ask) and has seen me use Google Now. So the other day she was trying to tell my phone 'Okay googoo.... paedo videos'. Also she likes 'surprise egg videos' (again, don't ask), Google Now interprets 'egg videos' as 'xvideos', so thats one feature that won't be returning to my phone any time soon.
Very true....When there were no black people where I lived,......when I did talk to a guy (I must have been 6 or 7 ) I asked why the palms of his hands were white (Mum and Dad gobs wide open!!!).... he said it was due the spray paint job he had from god.....he had to put his hands on the wall.....Fab that must have been great carried on been a 6 year old.......only a polnker would see this as racist.....work in progress....I would love to be compared to such a great animal!!
"Except Google don't have any sort of noble rationale behind why they are doing something so utterly stupid and offensive."
Look, no one hates Google as much as I do, but they didn't do this intentionally. And when they say "We’re appalled and genuinely sorry that this happened" I actually believe them. And I don't believe much of what they say, I promise you.
The charge of racism is directed towards the programmers for not having used enough photos of black people
So "racism" now extends to using a biased training set? Oh brave new world.
"Be offended often. It helps in not noticing the real problems."
Implicit racism informed the selection bias so subtly that those developing the tool failed to notice that the samples fed into their tool were not representative of the extent of variation existing outside the confines of the Silicon Valley/Bay Area.
>So "racism" now extends to using a biased training set?
Let's read the first sentence of Wikipedia's current entry on racism: "Racism consists of ideologies and practices that seek to justify, or cause, the unequal distribution of privileges, rights or goods among different racial groups."
So we have the right---or perhaps privilege---of being recognised as an instance of H. sapiens sapiens apparently being caused to be distributed unequally via the use of a biased training set. QED
Don't dismiss the possibility of racists circlejerks tagging pictures in bulk to "train" the system whilst it is young.
I doubt these idiots are capable of such insight thou. Google only mistake was probably to only use pictures from Google+ ...
This link shows some of the ways they are teaching the image recognition software, ends up with some surreal photos.when they try and get it to interpret some images, clouds seem to give it some problems it see faces and things in the patterns.
http://googleresearch.blogspot.co.uk/2015/06/inceptionism-going-deeper-into-neural.html?m=1
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