Oh dear Lord, what has the world come to? Now even computers and the algorithms that they run have - all on their own - become (roll of drums) racist. And 'offensive'. You probably know of Flickr, the photo sharing site owned by the ultra-PC Yahoo Corp. Well it's gone rogue. It's akin to the nightmare science fiction scenario where the robots escape from the lab and head for town.
I'm referring here to Flickr's auto-tagging image-recognition system which automatically categorises photos into a number of broad groupings. For example a photo of a bridge could be tagged as 'architecture' or 'traffic' whereas that of a cartoon could be tagged as 'drawing' or 'sketch'.
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Now you'd imagine that any self-respecting computer, had it possessed any sense of the zeitgeist, would have tagged the gentleman shown here as 'doctor', 'scientist' or 'engineer'. But (and if you're of delicate constitution read no further) the tags were in fact 'ape' and 'animal'. To make matters worse a picture of Auschwitz was not tagged with 'death camp' or 'jackpot' but instead as a 'jungle gym' and 'sports ground'.
Oh my achin' sides! Took me ten minutes to clean off my screen.
Naturally all the PC alarms went off together and the Thought Police technology division has now swung into action. The code of the offending algorithm will be carefully parsed by experts both in technology and micro aggressions to see whether the tagging outcomes were deliberate. Or whether they represented, how shall I put this, a natural mistake.
And now news has come to hand that Koko, the famously intelligent Congolese gorilla, has been outraged at having been assigned the tag 'Serena Williams'.
Out of the mouths of computers and algorithms...
I'm referring here to Flickr's auto-tagging image-recognition system which automatically categorises photos into a number of broad groupings. For example a photo of a bridge could be tagged as 'architecture' or 'traffic' whereas that of a cartoon could be tagged as 'drawing' or 'sketch'.
Now you'd imagine that any self-respecting computer, had it possessed any sense of the zeitgeist, would have tagged the gentleman shown here as 'doctor', 'scientist' or 'engineer'. But (and if you're of delicate constitution read no further) the tags were in fact 'ape' and 'animal'. To make matters worse a picture of Auschwitz was not tagged with 'death camp' or 'jackpot' but instead as a 'jungle gym' and 'sports ground'.Oh my achin' sides! Took me ten minutes to clean off my screen.
Naturally all the PC alarms went off together and the Thought Police technology division has now swung into action. The code of the offending algorithm will be carefully parsed by experts both in technology and micro aggressions to see whether the tagging outcomes were deliberate. Or whether they represented, how shall I put this, a natural mistake.
And now news has come to hand that Koko, the famously intelligent Congolese gorilla, has been outraged at having been assigned the tag 'Serena Williams'.
Out of the mouths of computers and algorithms...