Google’s Photo App Still Can’t Find Gorillas. And Neither Can Apple’s.
Google’s and Apple’s tools were clearly the most sophisticated when it came to image analysis.
Yet Google, whose Android software underpins most of the world’s smartphones, has made the decision to turn off the ability to visually search for primates for fear of making an offensive mistake and labeling a person as an animal. And Apple, with technology that performed similarly to Google’s in our test, appeared to disable the ability to look for monkeys and apes as well.
Consumers may not need to frequently perform such a search — though in 2019, an iPhone user complained on Apple’s customer support forum that the software “can’t find monkeys in photos on my device.” But the issue raises larger questions about other unfixed, or unfixable, flaws lurking in services that rely on computer vision — a technology that interprets visual images — as well as other products powered by A.I.
Mr. Alciné was dismayed to learn that Google has still not fully solved the problem and said society puts too much trust in technology.
“I’m going to forever have no faith in this A.I.,” he said.
Computer vision products are now used for tasks as mundane as sending an alert when there is a package on the doorstep, and as weighty as navigating cars and finding perpetrators in law enforcement investigations.
Errors can reflect racist attitudes among those encoding the data. In the gorilla incident, two former Google employees who worked on this technology said the problem was that the company had not put enough photos of Black people in the image collection that it used to train its A.I. system. As a result, the technology was not familiar enough with darker-skinned people and confused them for gorillas.
Source: The New York Times
