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When Image Recognition Goes Horribly Wrong

posted by janrinok on Wednesday July 01 2015, @05:29AM   
from the did-you-really-just-call-her-that? dept.

Beryllium Sphere (r) writes:

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.

http://www.slate.com/blogs/future_tense/2015/06/30/google_s_image_recognition_software_returns_some_surprisingly_racist_results.html

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Original Submission

• Albino gorilla (singular) (Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday July 01 2015, @08:22PM

  by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday July 01 2015, @08:22PM (#203951)

  I remember when Snowflake made the cover of National Geographic in 1967.

  At first, the Barcelona Zoo was not aware that Snowflake was a unique specimen. They sent a message to Sabater Pi saying, "Please send more white gorillas."
  [...]
  Snowflake fathered twenty-two offspring by three different mates, or "dams". Six of his offspring survived to adulthood. None of Snowflake's offspring were albino, but all should be heterozygous, recessive carriers, for the albino gene. His grandchildren have 50% mathematical probability for carrying the albino gene. If both parents were albino gene carriers they have 25% chance of producing an albino offspring.

  Snowflake (gorilla) [wikipedia.org]

  -- gewg_

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