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Google Apologises For Photos App's Racist Blunder
Mark Wilson writes: Google has issued an apology after the automatic tagging feature of its Photos apps labeled a black couple as "gorillas". This is not the first time an algorithm has been found to have caused racial upset. Earlier in the year Flickr came under fire after its system tagged images of concentration camps as sports venues and black people as apes. The company was criticized on social networks after a New York software developer questioned the efficacy of Google's algorithm. Accused of racism, Google said that it was "appalled" by what had happened, branding it as "100% not OK".
It's impressive that it can even recognize and classify things as such. Great apes and humans share about 99% of our DNA, any 'alien' entity would classify us amongst the apes.
The fact that black people are black and thus have a closer resemblance to the generally 'darker' great apes is not racist because an algorithm that is not programmed to have biases cannot be racist. It's just peoples interpretation of the facts that makes things 'racist'. Superficially, black people and apes look mathematically more alike than white people and apes. If the thing was trained on albino apes (which do exist), white people would be considered apes AND NOBODY WOULD THINK IT WAS RACIST.
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And as Richard Dawkins has said, we ARE apes - all of us humans.
"Ape" is a general language term that can be used by different people to specify quite different groups of creatures; it's more correct to say we're all hominids.
That woman does look like a gorilla when she makes faces like that, can't blame the computer that automatically flagged you for that.
So, do really pale "white" people get mis-labeled as ghosts? Inquiring minds are somewhat concerned because they are rather pale....
One of the articles I saw about this mentioned that in the past, light-skinned people had been identified as dogs and seals. Strangely, there was no outrage about that.
The algorithm wasn't that far off. I'm sure the gorilla will come over it.
Richard Dawkins is a biologist. he would never say something so stupid. we are all hominids, and we are certainly not apes.
The developers building vision algorithms don't typically create their own datasets. They purchase archives of images, and a lot of these problems stem from how many samples of each type are in those archives. The Google team likely has a giant database of human faces that it works with, and the ethnic frequencies are probably either the result of choices made by whatever origanization compiled it (and for whatever reason they compiled it) or the ethnic breakdown of the userbase of some app they used to grab the data. It's extremely unlikely that either of those will produce the same number of samples of every ethnic type.
It's also one thing if this was a program just designed to distinguish between different people. But it looks like it's trying to recognize objects of all sorts and distinguish between people and just about everything else. That's a hard problem, and the only response to this sort o thing is to take a regular failure case and feed it back into the training data so you can hit the next regular failure case. Hopefully it will be less coincidentally embarrassing, but it will definitely be there. Perhaps confusing bald men with balloons or something like that.
But I also think people underestimate how much skin color affects machine vision problems. I spent years in the biometrics industry and one consistent fact is that people with darker skin just don't provide as much easy-to-recognize detail as people with lighter skin. There will be more misclassifications as long as the image is taken using the visible spectrum. To a computer extracting features, dark skinned people and gorillas are both human-ish face shapes with a particular color range and somewhat indistinct geometry due to weak contrast and shadows. Distingushing between those two sets just isn't as easy as distinguishing between fair-skinned blondes and gorillas. You can make that decision just by looking at the color histograms and not even bothering with geometry.
An interesting anagram of "BANACH TARSKI" is "BANACH TARSKI BANACH TARSKI"
It isn't a racist outcome. It is the outcome of a flawed algorithm.
You're not paying attention. These days, outcomes that have nothing to do with intention, purpose, or simple transparent standards, but which happen to lean statistically towards results not in perfect balance with skin color as a function of population (though, only in one direction) ... the process must be considered racist. The whole "disparate impact" line of thinking is based on this. If you apply a standard (say, physical strength or attention to detail or quick problem solving, whatever) to people applying to work as, say, firefighters ... if (REGARDLESS of the mix of people who apply) you get more white people getting the jobs, then the standards must surely be racist, even if nobody can point to a single feature of those standards that can be identified as such. Outcomes now retro-actively re-invent the character of whoever sets a standard, and finds them to be a racist. Never mind that holding some particular group, based on their skin color, to some LOWER standard is actually racist, and incredibly condescending. But too bad: outcomes dictate racist-ness now, not policies, actions, purpose, motivation, or objective standards.
So, yeah. The algorithm, without having a single "racist" feature to it, can still be considered racist. Because that pleases the Big SJW industry.
It's the same thinking that says black people aren't smart enough to get a free photo ID from their state, and so laws requiring people to prove who they are when they're casting votes for the people who will govern all of us are, of course, labeled as racist by SJW's sitting in their Outrage Seminar meetings. It's hard to believe things have come that far, but they have.
Don't disappoint your bird dog. Go to the range.
Richard Dawkins is a biologist. he would never say something so stupid.
I'm curious what you feel is stupid about that straightforward statement. Regardless, Richard Dawkins did, in fact, say exactly that.
Gaps in the Mind, by Richard Dawkins
"We admit that we are like apes, but we seldom realise that we are apes."
"In truth, not only are we apes, we are African apes. The category 'African apes', if you don't arbitrarily exclude humans, is a natural one"
"'Great apes', too, is a natural category only so long as it includes humans. We are great apes."
I did a search for the words "dawkins" and "ape" and the first result was a video of Dawkins saying that he is an ape. I challenge you to find any living biologist that claims otherwise.
we are all hominids, and we are certainly not apes.
Gorillas are hominids, and all hominids are apes. Humans are apes and hominids, just like gorillas.