Slashdot Mirror
When It Comes to Gorillas, Google Photos Remains Blind (wired.com)
Tom Simonite, writing for Wired: In 2015, a black software developer embarrassed Google by tweeting that the company's Photos service had labeled photos of him with a black friend as "gorillas." Google declared itself "appalled and genuinely sorry." An engineer who became the public face of the clean-up operation said the label gorilla would no longer be applied to groups of images, and that Google was "working on longer-term fixes." More than two years later, one of those fixes is erasing gorillas, and some other primates, from the service's lexicon. The awkward workaround illustrates the difficulties Google and other tech companies face in advancing image-recognition technology, which the companies hope to use in self-driving cars, personal assistants, and other products. WIRED tested Google Photos using a collection of 40,000 images well-stocked with animals. It performed impressively at finding many creatures, including pandas and poodles. But the service reported "no results" for the search terms "gorilla," "chimp," "chimpanzee," and "monkey."
Considering the equivalent intelligence of a computer, mis-identifying a gorilla and a black person based on facial features alone isn't half bad... It's exactly something you'd expect from a low intelligence entity with little experience and limited comprehension of the ramifications of the identification. Similar to a toddler, don't be surprised when computers start thinking all fat people are going to have a baby just because they have been told that there is a baby inside a big belly.
It's pattern recognition. The computers are seeing a pattern, but it's incomplete and thus wrong. It's not like the computer was programmed to be offensive...
Yes it's an anecdote! Were you expecting original research in a Slashdot comment?
A self-driving car (if it needed to distinguish between gorillas and black people) wouldn't have as much problem because it can adjust the camera's exposure to where it can see enough detail to distinguish the two. ...
A professional photographer knows this. The average person taking a snapshot, and the auto-exposure algorithm in their camera, does not.
There is a a fascinating contradiction here that reveals why "self driving cars" are not anywhere close to being a reality.
In order for the car to adjust the camera exposure to see enough detail to distinguish between a black person and a gorilla, it needs to somehow "know" that there is a problem with what it "thinks" it sees. Of course a professional photographer has the skill to do this, because they are considered to be intelligent. If the car is able to do this, then it, too, will be considered intelligent - but that puts us in the uncomfortable position of needing a self-driving car to be intelligent in order for it to operate safely, such that it can identify the situation where it "knows" there is a problem with what it "thinks" it is seeing.
Who is working on this problem? The AI researchers have their hands full with getting their programs to identify street signs, but now the code needs to have some common sense, an ability to reflect on its own conclusions. "I see two gorillas crossing the street... oh, wait, that doesn't make any sense, let me adjust the camera exposure... Ah, whereas before I saw two gorillas crossing the street, I now see one gorilla and one dark skinned individual."
And even if the "one gorilla and one dark skinned individual" conclusion is silly and contrived, at some point the self-driving car has to make a decision, it has to *do something* in response to the situation. If it spends .5 seconds adjusting the camera exposure and analyzing the scene over and over, all it has done is distracted itself - just like a real driver.
It was frequently used as a term of offense during the slave trade...
While Gorilla has been used as offensive term for blacks, you shouldn't make up facts. Just stick to the truth - it's bad enough as it is.
Gorillas weren't even known in the Western world until 1847. There's only a 14-year overlap with American Slavery (trans-atlantic slave trade having been abolished almost a half century before the discovery), and it's not like the American South was tapped into the latest ecology news out of Africa.