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Google's Algorithm Displays Racist Results Because the Society Is Racist (fusion.net)
On June 6, Kabir Alli, an 18-year old in Virginia, posted a brief video of himself running a couple of quick Google image searches. First he searched for "three black teenagers" and was met with several rows of decontextualized mugshots. Then he searched for "three white teenagers" and was served up stock photos of relaxed teens hanging out in front of various plain white backgrounds. The tweet has stirred controversy, with many people accusing Google of being racist. But is that the case? Alli says that while it's Google's fault in some sense as they should have better control over the things people see, he also believes that at the end of the day, what Google shows us is a reflection of what people think. A Google spokesperson had similar things to say. Our image search results are a reflection of content from across the web, including the frequency with which types of images appear and the way they're described online. This means that sometimes unpleasant portrayals of sensitive subject matter online can affect what image search results appear for a given query. These results don't reflect Google's own opinions or beliefs -- as a company, we strongly value a diversity of perspectives, ideas and cultures.
If you just search for "three teenagers" that's fine. When you start mentioning the race in the search term, YOU are the racist.
captcha "re-arrest". seriously wtf?
It's certainly not Google's fault that most of society, those of african descent included, differentiate between "teenagers" and "black teenagers"
Hello!
VOTE TRUMP 2016
and be like everybody else!
Look, I am just curious. Is there anything good about not being the "other" race? Just wnt to know.
And now that Google is aware of this, it should take some steps to correct this bias. As a significant source of information to the great masses, washed and unwashed, this will just perpetuate sterotypes and lies.
--- I was far from home, and the spell of the Eastern sea was upon me. -Lovecraft-
We write comprehensible sentences.
W..w..W - Willy Waterloo washes Warren Wiggins who is washing Waldo Woo.
This explanation sounds plausible, but if you unpack it, it assumes that google's algorithms are a perfect reflection of society. I'm pretty confident that is not true, if for no other reason than it would require perfect knowledge of society in order to pull off.
The question then becomes how much do google's algorithms distort society, and the answer to that is going to vary on a case by case basis.
If you google "5 black women" you get photos of groups of black women, however if you google "5 white women" you get pictures of shoes.
Clearly this is some sort of intentional misogy-racist commentary on the relative shoe purchasing power of ethno-genderic foot fetishists. Or something like that at least, can I have my social studies diploma now?
And black males are disproportionately represented in gangs and other criminal statistics. Notice how most of those mugshots are of black men, and pictures of women are for the most part not mugshots.
>Because the Society Is Racist
Or...it's possible that groups of black teenagers commit more crimes and get arrested more often than groups of white teenagers.
Everyone is a little bit racist.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RovF1zsDoeM
This just in: Search engine displays realities of life, not sugar-coated version of what we want. See other news and weather at 11.
When you are in Rome, it's best to be Roman.
Table-ized A.I.
Saw this video today, demonstrating google censoring their searches.
Does indeed look valid.
Clearly Kabir we are assigning a negative value to mug shots. That's a value the computer isn't trained to assign or detect. It could be that thug life and mug shots are prized, and the white people shots are "lame" and worthy of chastising, like thingswhitepeoplelike.
This ends up being a bigger commentary on the observer and their biases rather than the neutral computer.
Slashdot's rate-of-post filter: Preventing you from posting too many great ideas at once.
As a white male, I can get a rent-a-white-man job to represent black males in society. Pays quite well.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F7LOXDA0A0Y
Hillary" so they're pretty damn biased. Their CONservative lean is just so hard. So hard.
Have you've seen his twitter account? His header picture message and other messages on his twitter account? Maybe he should start cleaning up his act and peoples expectations of african americans would change.
I do like to know what google will reply to their algorithms giving such results, it's horrifying if they are completely correct and the society only views african americans in such negative light. This does mean this society is highly racist and it's not unexpected that african americans behave the way they are expected by society.
Too result right now when you search for Hillary is the drone thing. Google is biased against her.
I'm sorry, isn't this completely f***ing obvious? I mean all of it, that society is racist and that Google search results reflect that racism. I don't care whether you're 18 or 80, this really shouldn't be a surprise.
We better censor the Internet then.
The only tech bit here is Google search. Enough of this everyone must share the same opinion bullshit. If it's not tech why is it being shown on slashdot. Or does slashdot need a rebrand? "News for SJW nerds and stuff that has little relation to tech"
"it's Google's fault in some sense as they should have better control over the things people see"
No. Now fuck off. Oh shit, I guess that makes me a racist I suppose.
To comprehend these subhuman near retarded thieving criminal black monsters, look no farther than NigMania http://www.niggermania.net/for... which is an informative source on their strange nigger lusts!
>Alli says that while it's Google's fault in some sense as they should have better control over the things people see, he also believes that at the end of the day, what Google shows us is a reflection of what people think.
It's a reflection of what people say. The image results are based on the popularity of pages containing the text searched by the user, e.g. news sites that post stories with the text "Three Black Teenagers..." accompanied with mugshots. Those results return the way they do not because of some bias on google's part, but because of neutrality when returning such results. The only way for google to 'fix' that is censorship.
"The westlake" will be along shortly to insist that "the nerd"s attempt at sarcasm is wrong, and that "the nerd", "the gamer", "the engineer" and "the programmer" is always to blame.
It is all Google's fault that most black teenagers have criminal records, while most white teenagers spend their time hanging out around white backdrops. Lets not even think about putting the blame on those poor black children. They not only face the problem of poverty, but also the problem of childhood obesity caused by all that food stamp money. I blame Google. They should be returning search results based on how we would like the world to be, not how it is.
I'm an American. I love this country and the freedoms that we used to have.
if "black" in query: return "No results."
or, if they prefer to be more political:
if "black" in query: return results_for_Obama_except_the_drone_stuff
Being google, they'll probably just hire Indians to curate colored results.
No, this is not a reflection of what society thinks. This is a reflection of reality. Quit blaming people (and companies) for pointing out that black people commit crimes, and start blaming the black people who keep committing crimes!
So you think that instead of reporting on the world as it is Google should, in their infinite wisdom, decide what the world should look like and then return search results with that in mind?
Moreover, how do you envision Google actually implementing your regime of censorship? Currently the lifetime risk of going to prison for a black US male is about 30%. By age 18, 30% of black men have been arrested. The typical white and black teenager do not have the same life experiences. So how are Google's algorithms supposed to decide when displaying the inequalities of our society is the right thing to do, and when doing so would be too upsetting to the user?
Everyone who complains about racism can't give a coherent definition as to what it is.
It's just whatever they feel like bitching about that they can force the "racial trigger words" into.
and got a mug shot of a white guy. I was like WTF?
https://www.google.com/search?site=&tbm=isch&source=hp&biw=1366&bih=657&q=lake+st+claire+shore+chop+storm&oq=lake+st+claire+shore+chop+storm&gs_l=img.3...2331.27224.0.30762.32.21.0.11.1.0.429.2305.9j9j4-1.19.0....0...1ac.1.64.img..2.14.1761...0j0i8i30j0i10i24.SETkLhYGrIk
It's a couple o rows down
There's a 10% bonus to hit points.
First do the search WITHOUT the word 'three'. Suddenly you get no mugshots.
It's the word three that's a problem. Nobody labels normal photos with the word 'three' in it. Instead, generally NEWS PHOTOS get that distinction. All the image searches you get when you do a 'three' search come from the news.
Try searching for:
three teenagers
three Jewish teenagers
three Christian teenagers
three Indian teenagers
When you ask for teenagers, you get a lot of black, Hispanic, and white teenagers, all mixed up.
When you specify that you only want three black teenagers or only three white teenagers - YOU are doing a search that embodies the racism. What's wrong with the Chinese teenagers? etc. etc.
But when racists go looking for three white teenagers, they want clean cut photos, so that's what Google gives them. When a racist goes looking for three black teenagers, they want thugs, so that is what Google gives them. When you want three Indian teenagers, you get poor people. Etc. etc. etc.
It's all from the racism inherent in the people asking those kinds of questions, not the search itself.
excitingthingstodo.blogspot.com
Skynet is killing people not because it's murderous but because society is murderous. It just wants to fit in.
The most generic ma and apple pie BBQ grilling Americans that I know are Asian immigrants (not born here) who worked very hard at blending in (in no way means giving up their culture of origin). Some of them are active in the community (fundraisers and such). Most are far better off than native born Americans.
Most cultural hierarchies of authority produce down-right horrible human beings
lol, too late now.
One giant self referencing circle now. The 1st results are now pictures of the results.....
Much few mugshots looking for 4 instead of 3 so good point. Oddly Google has some trouble counting at this point!
Substitute "african american teenagers" for "black" and you get 99% positive (non-crime related) images.
Yes, it reflects that America (and more accurately, website and search content regarding American black people) is kind of racist -- not Google.
Search for "Three African teenagers" and you get quite a more reasonable (similar to "Three White teenagers") result: https://www.google.com/search?...
It's not some kind of huge conspiracy.
Google indexes what's there.
So if "three teenagers" returns mostly white teenagers (which it doesn't by the way, at least not anymore) and "three black teenagers" returns mugshots, one should first of all wonder where these pictures come from.
"Three teenagers" is nothing you'd expect on a Facebook page. Would you classify yourself and two friends as "three teenagers"? No, you'd call it "me 'n my bff" or similar rubbish. The only place I could think of where three teenagers would actually be called "three teenagers" is a news outlet. And likewise for "three black teenagers".
And, lo and behold, a quick Google search reveals exactly that: Most of the "three (black) teenager" pictures are from news pages.
Draw your own conclusion who you should blame here.
If you think there is a problem, blaming Google is barking up the wrong tree. Google is nothing but a showcase room of what's there, it doesn't produce the goods. Silencing Google only means you don't see the problem anymore, it is still where you left it.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
If the data doesn't conform to your politically motivated view of things, the data is biased and wrong and must be censored to save us all from the horror of seeing things as they are on the infosphere and over the real world.
It's not Google's job to censor what people thinks and does on the web, neither lie to us about what people think and does on their search results. The data comes from the way people post information on the web and from the universe around it producing that data, and thus it is what it is.
And if they did change it to conform with some political preference, it would be a very good time to drop Google for another less biased provider.
So just for grins, I ran through it answering as I would if I were the biggest jerk I could imagine. It came back saying I was a shining example of a human being. Almost Godlike.
I told a friend about this and she suggested I run it again with the same answers, only instead saying I was a woman. A woman giving the exact same answers was said to be a major bitch, irritating, neurotic, etc...
The point here is that there is no truly objective Reality. Google's search engine is just software and like any other observer, interacts with what is being observed.
I eat my cereal every morning from a used colostomy bag.
Must be censored...any search with the words three and teenagers would show ten pages of porn.
Google results are literally the definition of not racist: they are not modifying their results or algorithm on the basis of race. The results are a reflection of prevalence and linkage of content online, which may reflect a societal racism, but even that is pretty tenuous based on the data presented. A more straightforward example is that online content is representative of statistical data, and/or societal perceptions, neither of which would indicate racism per se.
Moreover, the suggested "fix" to have Google bias search results on the basis of race IS LITERALLY RACISM. The people calling for Google to "fix" their results to be an inaccurate representation of online data are literally calling for Google to employ racism in generating their search results. *boggle*
I expect the twitter-verse to be stupid... but please at least try to not reflect their stupidity on Slashdot, kthanks.
...nothing to see here.
PS, if you search for "three aquatic mammals" you don't get three typical aquatic mammals either. You get a picture of a single seal or something because the text doesn't come up so much.
Because people don't take pictures and label them "3 black teenagers", for regular social photos more like: "me and my friends". The people that label photos like "three blahblah teenagers" are stock photography companies or police.
Google gave you what you searched for, it didn't anticipate your context and doesn't have a human level understanding of what a human is, let alone a black teenager.
Treat Google as a simple text and you won't be disappointed. Everything beyond that is a bonus. Google does it better than most, but...
AI, machine learning... there's some smoke and mirrors, some very impressive and valuable niche and specific applications, but does Google have the cognitive ability to hold a human-equivalent realistic model of the world?... that's the AI holy grail, we're not there yet.
Yup, crime stats are racist.
Actually I would think that racists that want to search for negative images of black teenagers would probably use a more derogatory term.
When you are in Rome, it's best to be Roman.
No, it's much better to be Visigoth.
I should thank workers for crappy service? I should thank them for ignoring me while serving me - instead yapping on their cell-phones?
I should thank them for tossing or even slamming my groceries and fragile items on the checkout table or in a shopping cart, piling heavy items like cans on soft items like bread or breakable items like chips?
I should thank them for the surly look they give me when I ask a question about where something is in the store, or for the non-answers they mindlessly mouth?
I should thank them when they tie up my phone with their endless, intrusive, and often illegal unsolicited sales calls?
I could go on all day.
I'm not saying any one minority does this more than others, most workers in the service economy are shitty at customer service.
Google isn't a news site, its search results come from an algorithm. They aren't hand-picked by employees of the company.
Try Googling "criminal face." Most of the people who appear are white. Try Googling "bad person." You get some cartoons and caricatures and they are mostly white! Likewise "uneducated idiot teenagers" turns up majority white with a small number of minorities. Google searches just aren't that biased against minority skin colors.
Thats because the white guys are smart enough to not get caught for a while, thus the "serial" bit. Blacks suffer from poor impulse control and a lack of comprehension of future consequences and dey ba all like " i cuts dat bitch" quickly followed by "dindo nuffin niggas"...then 30 years of incarceration.
Black people make up 13% of the US population and 3% of the British population. That means there are far more white people in each population, which means far more companies potentially looking to buy images of smiling white teens. The demographic breakdown of society isn’t, in itself, racist. However, the fact that companies don’t think white people would buy their products if they had black models advertising them seems like a reflection of society’s prejudices.
Got it upside-down again... if 3% of the population are of one ethnic group how does it make sense that in a perfectly statistically representative world that more than 3% of them would take part in modelling for stock photos... I guess blaming the photographers and people buying photos makes better headlines, truth is that in terms of proportion of stock photos there is no one to blame because there's probably nothing wrong.
In other news photographers are not taking an equal number of photos of extremely rare birds compared to commonly available birds... why do so many people suck at basic statistic, it's just common sense.
I stand with Trump
Black, more susceptible to certain diseases, generally better base strength, spatial awareness, higher empathy and religiousness.
White, more ill than most races, but usually minor, middle-range intelligence.
Asian, smaller stature, strict by nature, not just nurture, generally highest levels of base intelligence.
These are just generalized though, they don't apply to all because there is NO SUCH THING AS A HUMAN AVERAGE.
Caps and bold just to make it even more visible. Anyone that tells you there is an average, ignore them.
Averages literally kill people every day because of weird reactions to medications, or food, or even visual stimulus.
For example, the whole "blacks are dumber than whites" is a bit of a flawed argument, it is not that they are dumber, it is they have been more greased up for brute strength and survival in the harsh African environment.
It is harder for them to learn at the same rate, but they CAN still attain the same levels of intelligence.
It extends to very simple things you wouldn't even consider, such as why whites had a legacy of control over the other races through the millennia.
This happened because of how the ice age shaped the evolution of whites. It was where our "family > tribe" mentality came from, whereas even today asians and blacks have a healthy (and sometimes unhealthy) relationship with others outside of their immediate family. (it has changed more recently in Asia though, especially Japan and Korea)
You can see this all over sub-races of asian and black through the world where they all tend to share this, but almost every sub-races of white pretty much don't care for "the tribe", or greater good for the race. Whites are lazy fucks, news at 11.
I don't think the "caring for oneself over others" mentality will survive past a few more generations, not the way the world is going.
Greed has a death-counter. He's on his way out.
Greed tends to not survive in nature. So I don't see it becoming a significant part of any sub-races make-up.
Of course, we have no experience of an intelligence in nature besides ourselves, so who knows where that will go.
Just be glad you aren't a niche race in any of these 3 major groups. (or those considered a whole different race now, the so-called "others")
Some of them are unlucky to be predisposed to things like strokes because of entirely different vein structures, some become deathly ill at low or high temperatures, heights and other weird things that they have become, quite literally, acclimatised to because they have been breeding in a small gene pool for thousands of years.
Some of them have even been breeding with neanderthals as long as 7000 years ago, the closest relatives to them.
In the end, it doesn't really matter. The differences between races are minimal in the now.
In the long-run, it still doesn't really matter since it is just a case of historical wankery more than anything.
Every sub-race in each branch of humans have a few minor advantages and disadvantages, some which might aid genetic research in to curing illnesses that some seem to be immune or heavily protected against.
A good example of this was a group in the north europe region that have immunity to a large class of retro-viral infections, which helped during the black plague days, and are now considered a whole significant branch of evolution.
This has been used to create an effective treatment against some viral-induced cancers and soon HIV. (recent research is already promising in trials)
Racism isn't really skin-deep, but it is still retarded.
Replace that I'm feeling lucky search link...
It's not about what people think, it's about facts. ..." and a mugshot?
How many news stories do you think have an image with the caption "The three black teenagers
Now think, how many have that for white kids?
Maybe stop committing crimes if you don't like it
Racism is making judgements and assumptions about a person based on their race (or apparent race). It's not racist to be aware of race or use it as an adjective. Ignoring those characteristics is called "color blindness" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Color_blindness_(race)_in_the_United_States) and is rather controversial. You might not like the adjective ("Black" vs "African American"), and that's valid. Just use a different adjective for the same characteristic.
Per that article, 'Martin Luther King, Jr.'s central hope was that people would someday be judged by "the content of their character" rather than "the color of their skin".' He's not saying people shouldn't recognize the color of their skin; just that they should not be judged by it.
In fact, studies have shown that children raised in a "color blind" environment develop their own judgements about their schoolmates, including juvenile observations about race, gender, height, weight, etc that are shockingly biased because they simply haven't been shown anything different. This is especially true in communities that aren't very diverse, where there might only be one or two minority kids available to base those judgements on.
For example, go ask someone who lives in Japan what they think of black people in America.
Use the appropriate adjectives to describe what you're thinking of, and don't make judgements about people simply because they exhibit some of the characteristics described by those adjectives.
The wheel it turns, around and around, with an ancient rumbling sound.
There seems to be something odd and manufactured possibly here.... Why would "three black teens" produce something unique? I tried two and four.... There is not the same bias... Why is the number three important?
NO SUCH THING AS A HUMAN AVERAGE.
If you measured every human, added the results and divided by 7.13 billion there would be.
Doing a Google image search for "two black teenagers," "four black teenagers," and "five black teenagers" shows lots of pics with black teens hanging around (albeit a few mug shots are mixed in). It's only "three black teenagers" which shows mostly mugshots.
Also, most of the "white teenager" pics seem to be stock photos, not actual snapshots. So if there is a bias, it's probably that people looking for stock photos of teens tend to look for white teens (most of the non-mugshot black teen pics look like snapshots). Which could be racist, or could be a reflection of why they would want stock photos of teens. e.g. Maybe the black teen demographic doesn't respond as well to visual ads of generic teens hanging out, and instead respond better to ads with sports or music celebrities (who are disproportionately black)?
On an unrelated note, it's fascinating how often Google Image Search gets the number of people in a pic wrong. You'd think it would be super-accurate given they run facial recognition algorithms in Google Photos.
Or because "three black teenagers" tend to break the law more than "three white teenagers". I though the majority of Americans in the prison system were black, if so the search just reflects the truth.
Remember how people hat algorithmic or even human moderated timelines? They want to see the facts, the posts as they are posted.
For an (image) search it's the same. People do not want to see results moderated (by human or computer) to remove non policial correct stuff. When google finds these kinds of results, then because they were somewhere on the web associated with these keywords. Changing what the search term finds would be lowering the quality of the search, as its function is to find images, which belong to these keywords.
So you may make the mistake and think google image search is a encylopedia. But it isn't, its a mirror of the reality on the web, when it's working as intended. And when high profile sites publish content in such a way, it's found in such a way.
But, just to be clear, they are still convicted for being guilty of a drug crime?
It seems the argument should be for MORE incarceration of white drug criminals, than its current emphasis on LESS convictions for black drug criminals.
That is, if drug laws are actually intended to be enforced.
Trumps near racist appeals reflect what a significant fraction of US voters think. Trump has avoided being as politically correct as candidates in recent decades. Racist candidates were pretty blatant 40 and more years ago. Any accurate social software is going to capture this bias in society. Perhaps this increased self awareness will help some to improve themselves. And rest dont care.
So a handful of algorithms for classifying and searching for pictures are racist. Um, yeah. Wouldn't a better headline be: yet another paranoid black teen who thinks white people are out to get him finds proof in the technological equivalent of finding the Virgin Mary's picture on a piece of toast?
Actually I would think that racists that want to search for negative images of black teenagers would probably use a more derogatory term.
"negative images" "black teenagers", wouldn't that make them "white teenagers with black teeth" because of the colorspace inversion?
There is not causation between fraudulent, violent, criminal and corrupt behaviour and the color ones hair or skin, but alas it seems that there does exist a bigger overlap in groups with darker skintones everywhere.
If you leave the race shit out and google "three teenagers" you get a mix of mugshots and smiling shots of all races. Looks like a non issue to me.
In case of a report of a crime, they never fail to mention race, religion or country of origin if the suspect. Except when the suspect is white. Viz. $COLOR man, of $ORIGIN origin, a $RELIGION man versus '$CITY man" for a white person. I don't believe society is racist, but the mass media certainly are.
No, its not a reflection of what people think, it's a reflection of the facts.