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Shirt Without Stripes

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Re: Shirt Without Stripes

#221

The point that the author is making, in a very understated way, is that all three companies have PR websites that breathlessly describe their advanced AI capabilities, yet they cannot understand a very simple query that young children can.

At least this is relatively innocuous. Until recently if you did a Google Image Search for "person" or "people", it only showed white men.

I couldn't quite believe your comment when I read it so I did a Google image search for "person" and the results weren't a lot better than you'd suggested. Mostly white men, a few white women, a very few black women, a handful of Asians, and multiple instances of Terry Crews.

The net result of that Google search, combined with the "Shirt Without Stripes" repo, leaves me even more unimpressed with the capabilities of our AI overlords.

Re: Shirt Without Stripes

#222

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Does Amazon pretends to do AI? They are just offering a platform to do your own Machine Learning. I don't think they ever said their search engine was doing anything smart. EDIT: scrap that, I didn't mean Alexa, which is doing AI obviously, but the search engine of Amazon's retail website. Anyway, NLP is hard and everyone sucks at it. Think about it: just building something that could work with any or any other way t…

ML and AI are the same thing You're right the NLP is hard, but not everyone sucks at it.

> ML and AI are the same thing

Not actually true. ML is one area of study within the field of AI. Thanks to marketing departments and slightly shoddy journalism these two things are now casually treated as equivalents, but they're really not: ML is still very much a subset of AI.

Re: Shirt Without Stripes

#223
post #101

I would never search for something this way. If I wanted to find a 4WD car, I wouldn't search for "cars without 2WD." Likewise, here, I would search for solid-colored shirts. And these services are limited to the content/terminology utilized by the cataloged sites/products. If I am selling a "black shirt" or a "solid black shirt," it is not google's job to catalog it as a "shirt without stripes," unless I advertise i…

But it what if you just hate shirts with stripes but do like polka dots or other patterns? You can do a fancy advanced search query with OR and EXCLUDE tricks but that is not what this post is trying to emphasize.

Let's assume the point of the OP is that Google sucks at understanding this search that most people would logically understand.

But let's also logically assume that most content on the web is telling the visitor what their page or product is, not what it is not.

I would expect a shirt to be advertised and described as what it is: “black shirt” not “shirt without stripes.”

So if a content creator does not include the exact term “without stripes” in the description of shirt, then you are relying on google to infer meaning on your behalf and the content creator.

Now, this is relatively inconsequential for a shirt and perhaps not well representative, as a fashion-related searches a different than many searches. If I search for “news without coronavirus,” should I expect only articles that do not refer to coronavirus? I wouldn’t.

If I was allergic to peanuts and I searched for “food without peanuts,” I would expect results from content creators and sellers of products who took care to include the term “without peanuts,” because they are advertising their product as safe for those with peanut allergies. I would not rely on google or amazon to make that determination for me.

Both for google and individual sites, there are better options to further narrow results. If you don’t want to narrowly define your result to a specific pattern or color, the first search more broadly and then used advanced settings or filters to omit terms and/or include others.

Re: Shirt Without Stripes

#224
post #194

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I disagree, "shirt without stripes" is an unusual word choice, not one that our ML models would be optimized for. Try "solid color shirt" and you'll see how much better the results are - at least on Google.

"Shirt without stripes" may (or may not) be an unusual word choice to enter into a search engine, but it's definitely one that a child would understand. Additionally, "shirt without stripes" is not the same as "solid color shirt"; as an example, take a look at: https://www.google.com/search?q=tie+dye+shirt

Quite so. "Shirt without stripes" can include shirts in plenty of patterns other than solid colours (paisley, polka dot, checked, battenberg, floral print, etc.).

Re: Shirt Without Stripes

#225
post #197

This problem is known as "attribution" - you have a "no" or "without" in the sentence, but you don't know where it belongs. One could (and one does) argue that the problem cannot be solved with statistical methods (ML), especially not in any domain where accuracy is required, such as medical recored analysis: "no evidence of cancer" and "evidence of no cancer" are very different things. Zooming out, the language fiel…

There is this, too, from 4 years ago, which seems reasonable in my not-very-well-informed opinion (speaking of which, I'm not sure the work referenced here can deal with hyphenated negation, but it should be simple to include)

https://www.aclweb.org/anthology/P14-1007.pdf

code: https://github.com/ffancellu/NegNN

Re: Shirt Without Stripes

#226
post #2

A good display of the current state of search engines.

Although search within apps can be even worse. I was looking through Google Movies the other day for the film 2001 and instead it swamps the results with those from the year 2001 - one could argue that there are lots of people who are massively keen to buy films based on the year of production, but I suspect it's better to satisfy those looking for years in the title first and then after that brief interruption list…

I realize the obvious fix for the Audible problem is to interpret double quotes as "only search for this phrase," but I wonder if an alternative solution would be do TFIDF for combinations of wordsm, not just individual words. For example, the search crawler could watch for the phrase "the book", "the book of", "the book of why", "book of", "book of why", and "of why", and weight the search results accordingly.

Re: Shirt Without Stripes

#227

The point that the author is making, in a very understated way, is that all three companies have PR websites that breathlessly describe their advanced AI capabilities, yet they cannot understand a very simple query that young children can.

At least this is relatively innocuous. Until recently if you did a Google Image Search for "person" or "people", it only showed white men.

They still have significant problems with "White American". There's a write-up here: https://whiteprivilegeisntreal.org/is-google-racist/

The "White American family" and "White American mother" results are especially offensive to White Americans.

Re: Shirt Without Stripes

#228

The point that the author is making, in a very understated way, is that all three companies have PR websites that breathlessly describe their advanced AI capabilities, yet they cannot understand a very simple query that young children can.

At least this is relatively innocuous. Until recently if you did a Google Image Search for "person" or "people", it only showed white men.

Huh, I tried that with 'people' and the first result that was all white was #15, first result that was 100% men was #8.

If I search for 'person' it's a mixed-race woman, then a white woman (Greta Thurnberg), then a white man.

Re: Shirt Without Stripes

#229
post #158

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You mean more stylish?!

He probably meant "more spicier". Second image for "now one with stripped this time please" yielded image that is linked to article about deep-fake nudes.

Well yeah, if you spell 'striped' like that it might lead to some spicy results. :)

Re: Shirt Without Stripes

#230
So I’d have to ask, is the problem the AI doesn’t intuit “without stripes”, find shirts that satisfy that condition (what kind of shirts? Dress shirts? T shirts?) and then do an image search identifing shirts and their quality of stripeyness
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