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AI in brief AI may be progressing rapidly, but it appears Google still hasn’t quite fixed an eight-year problem with its image recognition system: identifying pictures of gorillas accurately.
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. Alciné and his friend are both Black. Horrified, Google swiftly covered up the racist error by blocking the software’s ability to label images of gorillas.
Eight years later, the flaw still hasn’t been fixed properly. An experiment conducted by the New York Times found that users could search their photos by different types of animals – like cats and kangaroos – but not for gorillas, baboons, chimpanzees, orangutans, and monkeys.
The Photos app still steers clear of labelling images of primates. It’s not clear whether the company is unable to fix the issue, or if the feature is too controversial or risky to deploy. Interestingly, Apple’s Photo app and Microsoft’s OneDrive storage app had the same glitch too, while Amazon Photos tended to mistakenly label other types of animals as gorillas.
Alciné said he was disappointed Google has not fixed the problem. “I’m going to forever have no faith in this AI,” he said.
The non-profit arm of OpenAI pledged to award a total of a million dollars to people with good ideas on how to set up a democratic process whereby citizens can shape the development of AI.
Anyone can submit their proposals until June 2.
