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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?
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.
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 ?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.