Last week Google issued an apology after someone noticed that its image recognition software was mislabeling photographs of some black people as gorillas. This should help the company improve its diversity hiring following recent revelations that black workers comprise 2% of its overall workforce. According to the Daily Mail, the problems at the once-hip-company-turned-behemoth-with-lobbyists was caused by a new auto-tagging feature designed to make searching for images easier. Google isn’t the only company struggling with this stuff – Flickr’s auto-tagging system recently caused dismay when it was found to be labeling images of concentration camps as ‘jungle gyms.”
This kind of thing really puts me at ease. I can’t wait for the day some guy streaks naked across the field during the Super Bowl and Facebook’s facial recognition software instantly identifies the poorly endowed guy as Thomas Sullivan, Seattle.
I was curious to see what other labeling errors might be out there. So I did a keyword search on Google Images and found some shocking errors:
And then I found this obvious error:
And most shocking of all:
At least my image didn’t pop up after I searched on “scum.” I can live with this since everybody makes mistakes now and then. But I still don’t trust these companies as we move into the future.
The stud guy is kind of cute, actually.
That search term only showed puppy pics.
So many inherent dangers to using a corporate name as a verb…