SoylentNews is people
SoylentNews
from the did-you-really-just-call-her-that? dept.
Google Photo tries to categorize your pictures automatically. Until very recently, it had a failure mode in which its classification for some pictures of humans was "Gorillas".
Google reacted [and apologised] very quickly when they got a complaint from a black woman who had been misclassified.
When Brooklyn-based computer programmer Jacky Alcine looked over a set of images that he had uploaded to Google Photos on Sunday, he found that the service had attempted to classify them according to their contents. Google offers this capability as a selling point of its service, boasting that it lets you, “Search by what you remember about a photo, no description needed.” In Alcine’s case, many of those labels were basically accurate: A photograph of an airplane wing had been filed under “Airplanes,” one of two tall buildings under “Skyscrapers,” and so on.
Then there was a picture of Alcine and a friend. They’re both black. And Google had labeled the photo “Gorillas.” On investigation, Alcine found that many more photographs of the pair—and nothing else—had been placed under this literally dehumanizing rubric.
Speculating, it's possible that their software is heavy on statistical matching and it's really hard to debug, which is why they wound up simply deleting "Gorilla" from the list of possible categories.
Original Submission
(Score: 5, Interesting) by VLM on Wednesday July 01 2015, @12:04PM
*TO A COMPUTER* Gorillas have the same humanoid shape as people
Its actually worse, not just basic shape. There's a classic pix we've all seen but I can't find a link from one of the "save the gorillas in the mist" or whatever fundraising campaigns where they played photo games with cropping and angles and the gorilla looks like a human with a punched nose. You know, to get sympathy and financial donations you're going to use a pix that looks kinda human for PR, not a pix of them taking a dump or something. Not for all gorillas, not all pix of that one gorilla, but there is at least one pix of one gorilla one time, out there with VERY human ratios of eye separation to mouth width, eye separation to eye/mouth distance, gorilla eyes are basically human eyes, human looking mouth, basically a little plastic surgery, some make up, and a touch of photoshopping and that gorilla from that cropped specific angle could pass for a "people of walmart" entrant. It wouldn't take much work. You need the hair just right and the sun just right at just the right angle so you don't notice the brow ridge issues and the nose isn't so prominent, etc etc. The TLDR point I'm trying to make is there exist a subset of pictures of gorilla faces that pass quite well for possibly very bad pictures of human faces.
Or turning it around given the right blackface makeup and really weird lighting conditions to get things just right and give me a weird facial expression to make and do my hair just right, and a very carefully contrived and cropped pix of my head could easily pass for a pix of a somewhat deformed gorilla.
Its like those people that torture their pets by making them wear crazy animal Halloween costumes, no google, my coworkers dog really isn't Thomas the Tank Engine its just a dog wearing the craziest costume you've ever seen under ideal camera conditions. Those people must feed their dogs 50 pound of jerky to get them to tolerate that stuff, dogs are even worse than toddlers WRT that kind of thing.
I suspect a huge amount of the butthurt is creationist / non-evolution types trying to stealthily proclaim they are completely unrelated to lower primates, which is obviously pretty stupid. I don't care how much you claim it offends Jesus, at least some gorillas look like humans and vice versa because "Duh!" we're related, admittedly very distantly. You can act as offended as you want about photographs but the molecular biologists pretty much don't give a shit, we're closely related end of story. I suspect there's -kin people problems too, "well I feel I was born to be a vampire squid and it emotionally offends me when people say I'm biochemically a primate all that matters is how I feel so you have to treat me as if my delusions are real, you must love my tentacles".
Combine the above paragraphs and you got people who win "dog looks like its owner" contests, so considering we're biologically about a bazillion times closer related to gorillas than Shetland Sheepdogs or parrots, there should logically be about a bazillion times more "gorillas and dudes look alike" pix, for factual reasons that are really going to piss off creationist types.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday July 01 2015, @02:18PM