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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."
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.
So what do their cars do now when they spot a gorilla crossing the road?
while I kiss this guy.
Have you ever gone to the zoo and looked at the larger primates? They're fascinating because they're so much like us; I defy you to look a silverback in the eyes and not see a near-human intelligence looking back at you.
To a human, they're obviously not human... but to an algorithm checking out just the facial features? I'm surprised this didn't happen sooner.
Why is this so hard to accept as not only true, but also a giant image recognition/computer vision challenge?
You go to nearly any zoo with large primates and you're bound to hear someone say "They look so human!" Well of course they do, humans are primates.
Which means that it works in reverse, too, primates look like humans. And it's not surprising that blacks look more like gorillas. I mean, there is the whole black coloration to begin with, but also the flatter nose and other facial features of gorillas which are shared with black more than Caucasians.
Of course no reasonable human would think that a black *is* a gorilla or vice versa. But computer vision? It's like version 0.01 alpha and the similarities are strong enough that it's not surprising at all that it would misidentify blacks as gorillas or vice versa.
http://www.johnperkins.com/Eagle%20Monkeys.jpg
Google, Facebook and Twitter are curating the world's communications to fit their own political agendas. Each has been found manipulating information, despite denying it. Each of them has video evidence of their employees boasting about it.
What exactly is the political agenda here? That gorillas and black software developers are not in the same category? I think that science is settled. How exactly are they manipulating information? They have a program that labels photos by image identification. It's not perfect. But unless the program is capable of altering reality, there is no manipulation of information going on, just an algorithmic nut they haven't been able to solve yet.
And yet people are blindly allowing, even encouraging these tax-dodging global monopolies in their own sphere's to push a single way of thinking, even if that contradicts reality.
What exactly is it that contradicts reality here? Please elaborate.
The PC world may indeed have a problem with some things, but this is not it.
Or maybe it's a hard problem to solve. Don't stop being you, RightwingNutjob.
This has absolutely nothing to do with race at all and extremely little with machine learning. It's purely a technical problem and limitation of exposure of images. Looks like they need to refine their algorithms to process images more like the human brain does and quite possibly no amount of machine learning will fix this until they do that.
Black anything is difficult to expose correctly and when you put any bright object next to a dark object something is not going to be exposed correctly. The light subject will be blown out to expose the dark subject correctly or the dark subject will be darker to expose the light subject correctly.
With lighter complexions it's easier to see detail, with darker complexions, not so much. We just read about this 2 days ago in regards to the bird of paradise.
Well, fair is fair. Apparently if you type "goatse" into Google, you're going to see a picture of a conservative.
I've calculated my velocity with such exquisite precision that I have no idea where I am.
Or Meat bags?
X = -([squareroot] [infinity]) X = (i^2 * [infinity]) or (-1 * [infinity]) X = "A Black hole"
I expect a lot of humans wouldn't get 100% accuracy at telling species from the same order apart either. We have certain hardcoded advantages when it comes to our own species.
I'm as white as they come and Google Photos has tagged several monkeys in my pictures as me. Nobody is writing news stories about that (as well they shouldn't!), but because this guy is black the world ended ?
And John Cena of course.
Some settling may occur during posting.
Google can just roll up the windows and lock the doors in gorilla neighborhoods.
You do not have the right not to be offended. Generally I shouldn't go out of my way to do something just to offend you but that's not even close to the case here. I seriously doubt many people were offended. I do however think a certain group of people used this as an opportunity to criticize google. This group of people care less about difficulties black people face than they do care about being seen about caring about black issues. There is a reason SJW is a derogatory term.
There are so many actual issues that black or native North Americans face where the solutions are actually hindered by SJWs. It is quite frustrating.
If I had an algorithm that occasionally misidentified people in a way that can cause public outrage, I would filter the outputs to avoid controversy too.
Wake me up when they release a fixed version. Hell, a paper describing the issue in detail would be interesting---even fascinating, if I were any sort of expert.
Googles themselves admitted that their algorithms still make the same mistake. This article boils down to "hard problem takes longer than 3 year to solve"---with excessive puffery.
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According to the latest ruleset, this post should be modded as Vorpal Flamebait +5.
I wonder if this is why Google is also blind to steam donkeys?
I can only find ONE picture of a steam donkey, and it is not of one in actual operation, loading or unloading a ship, but one that has been half buried in an outdoor exhibit.
The rest are just pictures of the lyrics to the sea shanty "Donkey Riding".
YMMV, as this might only be because I was, in fact, previously searching for audio files of the sea shanty "Donkey Riding". I wanted to see what a real steam donkey actually looks like. Google doesn't seem to have had much luck finding that, and "helpfully" gave me pictures of the lyrics to "Donkey Riding" which is not what I was looking for.
...obscuring contrasts and therefore shapes.
It would be interesting to see how their algorithm did on pics with various color bit depths.
When Fascism comes to America, it will call itself Anti-Fascism, and tell you to give up your guns.
... since some black dudes were tagged as "gorillas", does that mean that some gorillas will be now detected as "black men"?
Because if not, I'll need to hurry up and find something else to be outraged about.
1) IQ tests are extremely culturally biased. There may be average intelligence differences you could correlate with skin colour, but none we can currently measure, and certainly none significant enough to use to prejudge individual ability.
2) Koko is a fraud that has been debunked several times. Koko is amazing, but nowhere near the level of amazing that the involved researchers proclaim.
3) Reality isn't nice, but you're racist.
They miscategorize a lot of things, that is not what caused the erasure of the category. The truth of AI categorization is only that an algorithm assigned that category, not that the category corresponds to reality.
The agenda is that society can only be told selective truths. Feefees of vulnerable classes can't be hurt and bigotry must not be given arguments, not even if those arguments are false. The truth must suffer for this agenda.
Depends. If it's 2018, yes. If it's 1900, no.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
Black people look more like gorillas than average in the same way white people look more like white bird poop than average. There are 'bad' things black people will look more like than other groups and there are 'good' things they'll look more like than other groups. All this algorithm did was uncover this relationship in its rough state. As it is refined it will uncover relationships more and more toward what is intended.
Either you are being deliberately obtuse or you're an idiot.
Gorilla is offensive for the same reason other terms used derogatorily are. It was frequently used as a term of offense during the slave trade and jim crow. There are references going back to the 1600's when the slave trade started referring to humans with dark skin as gorilla's or apes.
But go ahead and think it's not a big deal because you're an idiot, you'd think differently if someone had used the term to refer to you as sub-human.
You didn't get the memo. There are no more hard problems. The science is settled. In 2018, how could you think otherwise? Any output you don't like is evidence of racism. Appreciation for complexity gets you nowhere when you're on a mission from God.
Well, when we have a universally agreed definition of what "intelligence" is, and have shown how it can be accurately and usefully quantified as a single number (a rather extraordinary claim in itself), then maybe someone could start to design an unbiassed test for it. Wake me up when that happens. The HHGTTG joke about the ultimate answer being 42 had it right: there's no point looking for an answer until you have properly defined and understood the question.
I mean, the person at Google who thought "lets automatically, and without consent, tag the public's photos with names as identified by an untested algorithm without any checks on identifying people as animals, celebrities, famous criminals, other people's partners etc. - what could possibly go wrong?" probably aced a shitload of intelligence tests.
In a survey of 100 programmers, 111111 thought that duck-typing was a good idea.
So your self driving car detects 4 gorillas on one side and one man on the other and it must hit one of the two groups, which one will it select?
Feefees of vulnerable classes can't be hurt and bigotry must not be given arguments, not even if those arguments are false. The truth must suffer for this agenda.
Not sure what a "feefee" is, but if the "arguments are false" then how can the truth suffer? It sounds like you are reciting (badly) something you read without understanding it. The truth is suffering, but not from vulnerable classes.
Just because the truth can be used in a false argument, doesn't mean that is all the truth is good for.
Knowing when their algorithm fails will be valuable knowledge to many, not knowledge Google would be necessarily interested in handing out, but still valuable. In this case it's a truth solely hidden because it feels offensive.
What about Koko should be fraud?
Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
That don't apply anymore? Don't be a fucking idiot. Gorilla is a term as frequently used as any other racial slur. It's used just as often today as all the other terms as it was when it first started to be used.
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.
About 20 years ago, jewwatch was in the top 3 listings when searching for jews on yahoo search, due to the way that links were created. Too many people got upset, so things were patched to prevent this, by adding code to explicitly prevent this.
The error is to think that IQ tests only test native abilities. In a large part, IQ tests are about learned skills. Learned skills are culturally (or probably more accurately environmentally) biased. Look at the kind of abstract problems presented in an IQ test - it is quite easy to train about solving them. Does the few days (or even the few months) you spend on training on these tests make you more intelligent ? No, but you'll score higher. Likewise, the education you receive and the environment you are exposed to bias the tests results.
The real problem is people looking for racism in everything, perpetuating it generation after generation.
...and if you're looking for it, you're guaranteed to find it.
No.
No, it isn't. It was never "frequently used" as a racial epithet. There are instances of it being used, but it was never common - in English, at least. Perhaps you are thinking of "monkey", and can't tell your primates apart? "Monkey" at least was used as a racial epithet, although it was never a popular one.
Really, the only popular English racial epithet was "n*gger", starting about 1800.
oh hey. mi is being racist again.
color me not shocked.
The guy who said the election was rigged won the presidency with the second-most votes.
A relative gave us some old cartoons when my daughters were younger. My wife said she was watching a "Betty Boop" cartoon and couldn't figure out why there was a gorilla in the audience, until it started to spit watermelon and she realized it was a derogatory caricature. We removed those from our cartoon lineup.
I know some of the early Tom and Jerry cartoons I saw as a kid had similarly insensitive inclusions. It's actually pretty shocking to run across these sorts of things. It's easy to forgot how hurtful previous generations were.
I'm often reminded of this when I hear young people talking about civil rights. They aren't cognizant of the sorts of things that really happened. They can't fathom the idea of living every day afraid of rape or murder without any authority to turn to for protection.
Cheap storage VM.
Whether comparison with gorilla really was used to demean someone shall not play into our usage of it.
Only an obtuse idiot would allow evil racists to dictate his own vocabulary. Thatâ(TM)s one.
Back to computers, apes are very close to us both genetically and in appearance. For an algorithm to mistake specimens of the two species is not at all racist.
For an excercise, I challenge you to solve a problem thatâ(TM)s even simpler - to humans - describe, in English, how to distinguish a cat from a dog...
In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.
Did you really go from a cartoon gorilla eating a watermelon to rape and murder in two paragraphs?..
In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.
As usual, dave420's sole "contribution" to discourse is a personal insult...
Your invocation of "coloring" in vain was racist. Fuck you, racist. Shitposting racist...
In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.
You are welcome to cite the actual historical facts of which you find me ignorant. The above statement is offensively condescending and indicative of your lack of any specific arguments.
Citations? Citations supporting your implied claim, that such outcomes were not merely potential, but likely — and that the cartoon-depictions increased/contributed to the said likelihood.
Jim Crow laws are fully irrelevant to our subthread — these laws did not deny Blacks police protection, nor have the cartoons you found offensive made in the formerly Confederate states, where these laws were in effect. Please, stay on topic.
It being ugly does not mean it was widespread. And it being widespread does not mean, a programmer today must apologize for his algorithm's failure to reliably distinguish between Homo Sapiens and other hominids. It certainly is a feature worth improving or a bug worth fixing, but it certainly is not a manifestation of racism or even of "insensitivity".
In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.
So yes, the word gorilla was in use before 1847.
But was it used as a racist term for black humans?
Michelle Obama was sometimes referred to as a gorilla in a dress or some such. I think she postdates the slave trade.
"When you have eliminated the unacceptable, whatever is left, however improbable, must be the truthiness" - Holmes
Not to mention that, even if we established that US blacks were 10 IQ points less than US whites, it wouldn't necessarily mean anything biological. It would mean the average US black was 10 IQ points smarter than the average US person in 1930.
"When you have eliminated the unacceptable, whatever is left, however improbable, must be the truthiness" - Holmes
If it was that easy to train for them everyone (at least everyone who would gain from it) would have an IQ of a trillion.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
Nothing in there backs up the assertion that was made. You really should try to read whole sentences, not individual words.
You should read this and learn about how exposure works.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
And when idiots (even if they mean well) censor things it becomes even easier.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
There's a difference between censoring and choosing not to air in my house, especially when dealing with toddlers.
Cheap storage VM.