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Google Photos AI still can't label gorillas after racist errors

theregister.com

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Re: Google Photos AI still can't label gorillas after racist errors

#21

Post by rjh29 »

edgyquant wrote: post #7
jjevanoorschot wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm on board with assuming that the intent of Google / the engineers who built the classifier is not racist. However the outcome — labelling a black person as a gorilla — certainly is racist. What makes you think otherwise?

How is that racist? Because you’re projecting a racist comment onto it, a classifier? That does not make sense to me

The racism comes from the fact non-white people were not properly considered when the model was developed and trained. This comes up time and time again in AI, ranging from face ID that only works on white people, to porn classifiers that associate black people with NSFW images.

Re: Google Photos AI still can't label gorillas after racist errors

#22

Post by rjh29 »

syrrim wrote: post #10
jjevanoorschot wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm on board with assuming that the intent of Google / the engineers who built the classifier is not racist. However the outcome — labelling a black person as a gorilla — certainly is racist. What makes you think otherwise?

Presumably, the GP considers intent to be the only relevant factor in determining if something is racist.

Intent WAS a factor here. There was no intent to consider anyone other than white people when the model was trained.

Re: Google Photos AI still can't label gorillas after racist errors

#23

Post by 1123581321 »

giraffe_lady wrote: post #14
edgyquant wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How is that racist? Because you’re projecting a racist comment onto it, a classifier? That does not make sense to me

Racism isn't an objective order existing in the universe separate from us. It's part of human experience and exists where humans experience it. Given the recent history of equating black people with non-human primates, and using that to deny them rights & full participation in society, making this error is going to be experienced as racist. It's not a matter of individual malice or taxonomic classification, but of hi…

I suppose this could be an example of Popper’s third world.

Re: Google Photos AI still can't label gorillas after racist errors

#24

Post by mschuster91 »

version_five wrote: post #2

I agree that blocking the feature is the smartest thing to do if people are going to get offended. It's idiotic to call it "racist", it's a shitty classifier, and it's incredibly irresponsible (and probably racist) as well as dismissive of actual racism to pretend that's racist. At the same time, I'm surprised they can't get this classifier to work. It doesn't seem like a very challenging problem (I'd consider myself…

> It's idiotic to call it "racist", it's a shitty classifier, and it's incredibly irresponsible (and probably racist) as well as dismissive of actual racism to pretend that's racist.

To quote from the article:

>> The company was criticized when a software developer, Jacky Alciné, found the image recognition system deployed in its Photos app in 2015 had mistakenly labelled a photo of him and his friend as gorillas.

People who are black have every right to complain about Black people being classified as gorillas, particularly as that comparison is a very common act of discrimination - most infamously in soccer, where e.g. Vinícius Júnior is routinely subjected to monkey sounds and chants [1] and the President of the Spanish Agents association literally told him to "stop playing the monkey" as a goal celebration [2].

[1] https://www.cbssports.com/soccer/news/vinicius-junior-faces-...

[2] https://www.dailymail.co.uk/sport/sportsnews/article-1121907...

Re: Google Photos AI still can't label gorillas after racist errors

#25

Post by rjh29 »

noirbot wrote: post #4
ChatGTP wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

That would at least be an over-specific class though, as most colonialists are people . The issue here is that it's often not seeing people as people, and identifying them as animals. It would be more like if it ID'd white folks as cows or such.

White folks = cows isn't a fair comparison, there is a strong racist history of comparing black people to monkeys/gorillas that increases the social harm.

Re: Google Photos AI still can't label gorillas after racist errors

#26

Post by lisasays »

edgyquant wrote: post #7
jjevanoorschot wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm on board with assuming that the intent of Google / the engineers who built the classifier is not racist. However the outcome — labelling a black person as a gorilla — certainly is racist. What makes you think otherwise?

How is that racist? Because you’re projecting a racist comment onto it, a classifier? That does not make sense to me

If a system consistently misclassifies persons black persons far more than white persons -- and does so in a way that's obviously provocative and offensive -- then by definition it's racist in its effect (regardless of intent). The fact that the smartest company in the world cannot seem to get a handle on this problem after 8 years is also not unreasonable grounds to suspect that something's up.

Like that they don't appreciate the gravity of the problem, for example.

Re: Google Photos AI still can't label gorillas after racist errors

#27

Post by prepend »

jjevanoorschot wrote: post #5
version_five wrote: post #2

I agree that blocking the feature is the smartest thing to do if people are going to get offended. It's idiotic to call it "racist", it's a shitty classifier, and it's incredibly irresponsible (and probably racist) as well as dismissive of actual racism to pretend that's racist. At the same time, I'm surprised they can't get this classifier to work. It doesn't seem like a very challenging problem (I'd consider myself…

I'm on board with assuming that the intent of Google / the engineers who built the classifier is not racist. However the outcome — labelling a black person as a gorilla — certainly is racist. What makes you think otherwise?

The reason I don’t think the actual act of the program bugging is racist is I imagine it’s just some stupid rule based on shape (primates have a similar shape) and skin color and isn’t smart enough to distinguish humans vs gorillas vs Gumby toys with black/grey skin closer to a gorilla.

I think intent is important for labeling something racist and a function doesn’t have intent. And it doesn’t seem like the programmer had intent.

So I agree that a human seeing a person and labeling it as a gorilla is racist, it’s because the human is making an inappropriate value judgement.

Re: Google Photos AI still can't label gorillas after racist errors

#29

Post by pornel »

spiderfarmer wrote: post #8
jjevanoorschot wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm on board with assuming that the intent of Google / the engineers who built the classifier is not racist. However the outcome — labelling a black person as a gorilla — certainly is racist. What makes you think otherwise?

Define racism?

That's a good question. The ML bias this isn't necessarily due to one prejudiced person doing this on purpose. It's connected to systemic racism where history and culture added up to the status quo that is biased.

The fact is that training sets usually contain many more white men than black women, especially if they're just scraped off the web. People who guided the training may have just used datasets that reflect their own culture and demographics of their own country, and didn't see a problem with that. The opposite would have been be seen as "pandering to diversity" in their country, so they've ended up with a biased dataset and a biased algorithm.

Re: Google Photos AI still can't label gorillas after racist errors

#30

Post by Larrikin »

throwawaysleep wrote: post #11
version_five wrote: post #2

I agree that blocking the feature is the smartest thing to do if people are going to get offended. It's idiotic to call it "racist", it's a shitty classifier, and it's incredibly irresponsible (and probably racist) as well as dismissive of actual racism to pretend that's racist. At the same time, I'm surprised they can't get this classifier to work. It doesn't seem like a very challenging problem (I'd consider myself…

> I wonder if they're over-reacting There doesn't seem to be any benefit to solving this problem, so how is it an overreaction given the negative press?

There's no benefit to you personally maybe? I'm sure there's a lot of black people who would like to be correctly identified instead of being labeled gorillas.
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