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Facebook’s AI unlocks the ability to search photos by what’s in them

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Re: Facebook’s AI unlocks the ability to search photos by what’s in them

#51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If I search Google Photos for 'dog', the top seven hits are, in order: a fuzzy toy, a possum, another picture of the same possum, a cat, a pair of goats, a sheep, and I think it's a pheasant. The dog is #8. Of course, if I search Google Photos for 'me', the top hit is a frog, so maybe it just hates me. Update : not any more! Now the frog is #2. The top hit if I search for 'me' is the MV Isle of Lewis car ferry, photo…

Strange, I wonder why that is. I've got nothing but dogs on the full page. The first non-dog is a dog-collar on the 9th row. I don't get the ferry, either.

filter bubble probably: http://www.ted.com/talks/eli_pariser_beware_online_filter_bu...

Re: Facebook’s AI unlocks the ability to search photos by what’s in them

#52
post #8

Google photos does this. I just opened Google photos and searched for "food" and aside from a couple pictures of some jack o lanterns (which are arguable, but I don't know anybody who eats theirs on Nov 1st), the results were spot on. "Unlocks" might not be the right word here.

I'm assuming that the "I am not a robot" image captchas are being used as a massive source of training data. I've notice there are several tiers of question: * Select the images containing a street sign * Select the squares in an image containing a street sign * Draw a polygon around the sign Someone better informed than me might be able to comment on how that fits in to deep learning strategies.

Google has been leveraging people through captchas to do what computers are not good at for as long as google has been doing captchas.

Re: Facebook’s AI unlocks the ability to search photos by what’s in them

#53
post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The page would have cost me 60 euros worth of data in Cuba. If I pressed refresh, because something didn't load? 120 euros.

I wonder, how does one survive on the "modern" internet in a place like that? I feel i would die a little inside. Seems the only reliable way would be to navigate with everything disabled, even images, and manually (or automatically) allow images that are of certain types (no gifs) / size (not too big) and etc. I mean, that sounds so bad that i would argue you shouldn't even see the 50mb gif in that page, at all - ie…

As we did before the "overly bloated a.k.a modern" web, which is pretty much as you described: disable all the superfluous (images, scripts, css, iframes, webrtc, etc.) and enable one by one those you actually want.

Better, faster, more secure browsing experience.

The issue is in the bloated websites to begin with. Which usually means that if one website is bloated, you just skip it.

Re: Facebook’s AI unlocks the ability to search photos by what’s in them

#54
post #16

Seriously, a 51.6MB "gif" that doesn't really add anything to the article?

Really off-topic, but: Are there (tech) news-sites which do not have this 10-100MB bloat with three js framweorks and gifs, ads and whatnot? I'd gladly pay for a minimalist news source...

You could do what I do and open them in Links/Lynx, a command-line browser. You only need the text, anyways, right?

Re: Facebook’s AI unlocks the ability to search photos by what’s in them

#55
post #8

Google photos does this. I just opened Google photos and searched for "food" and aside from a couple pictures of some jack o lanterns (which are arguable, but I don't know anybody who eats theirs on Nov 1st), the results were spot on. "Unlocks" might not be the right word here.

If I search Google Photos for 'dog', the top seven hits are, in order: a fuzzy toy, a possum, another picture of the same possum, a cat, a pair of goats, a sheep, and I think it's a pheasant. The dog is #8. Of course, if I search Google Photos for 'me', the top hit is a frog, so maybe it just hates me. Update : not any more! Now the frog is #2. The top hit if I search for 'me' is the MV Isle of Lewis car ferry, photo…

Wow. The search of my photos for dog is impressively bad. Everything from kids on all fours to monkeys with the rare photo of an actual dog mixed in lightly.

Re: Facebook’s AI unlocks the ability to search photos by what’s in them

#57
post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Really off-topic, but: Are there (tech) news-sites which do not have this 10-100MB bloat with three js framweorks and gifs, ads and whatnot? I'd gladly pay for a minimalist news source...

It's kind of a PIA, but I enjoy using umatrix and ublock origin. Allows me to only turn on the stuff that I want.

https://github.com/gorhill/uBlock/wiki/Per-site-switches#no-...

Re: Facebook’s AI unlocks the ability to search photos by what’s in them

#58
post #2

Facebook's search is not useful. It's (obviously) segmented based on your own network, and generally useless for practical purposes. Perhaps law enforcement will find some use in this, but most people won't. Or at least, any utility beyond "Oh, remember that time I took a picture with that weird dog in it?"

My worry: It will someday let agents scan your images for items of interest in an automated fashion.

Firearms. Flags. Knives. Religious symbols.

It's not to great a leap to imagine this happening in a very restrictive culture where possession of the wrong religious text could be considered criminal. Or a deck of playing cards. A cassette tape of music. Alcohol or Cigarettes. etc.

Never forget technology is just a tool which can be used by dark sides of humanity too.

Re: Facebook’s AI unlocks the ability to search photos by what’s in them

#59
post #48
post #8

Google photos does this. I just opened Google photos and searched for "food" and aside from a couple pictures of some jack o lanterns (which are arguable, but I don't know anybody who eats theirs on Nov 1st), the results were spot on. "Unlocks" might not be the right word here.

Google never gets any credit. I used Google Now before Siri exploded the world. I listened to a machine learning series, which started like: "... applications include Facebook's facial recognition, Amazon's product recommendations, Google's image search, and Apple's self-driving car." Apple's car? Google is the world king of ML, and you gave them image search ?

Thank /you/ for giving us the credit!

Re: Facebook’s AI unlocks the ability to search photos by what’s in them

#60
post #2

Facebook's search is not useful. It's (obviously) segmented based on your own network, and generally useless for practical purposes. Perhaps law enforcement will find some use in this, but most people won't. Or at least, any utility beyond "Oh, remember that time I took a picture with that weird dog in it?"

The analysis of the images isn't meant for the users, it's so Facebook knows what's in them. Adding a user-facing interface is an easy-to-add toy for users and an attempt to recruit them into improving training data.
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