Why did Google’s AI identify a black man as a chimp?

Why did Google’s AI identify a black man as a chimp?📷Louis Vaught, Graduate Researcher at University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (2015-present)Answered 20h ago

This is almost certainly just a color thing. Here is a Gorilla, a Nigerian, and a Swede, straight from Google Images:

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From a “human perspective” a gorilla looks pretty different, but image processing algorithms don’t see the world the same way you or I do. The data they look at is all in terms of RGB color, and they basically do complicated pattern matching with how the colors are distributed across the image. They can easily be fooled by extreme perspective, bad lighting, weird coloration, or just a combination of similarly-colored objects.

To get good image recognition, you want to have sharp transitions between different colors, completely surrounding whatever you’re looking at. That gives a good “signal.” A neat tidbit most people don't notice is that search results bias to pictures that are easy to “read” - if you ask Google for specific objects, it really likes to give you high-contrast images with the subject near the center.

Humans generally look a decent amount like gorillas because we are related, and distinguishing between us repeatably is tricky for a computer. If you take every picture of a Gorilla and every picture of a Human and feed them into an image processing algorithm, there will likely be a good bit of overlap. Not only will images for “human” be marked “gorilla” - but images for “gorilla” may also be marked “human”

That’s exactly what auto-tagging is trying to do, is image recognition on every photo you upload. There’s going to be a lot of mistakes.

That problem is much less likely to happen with pictures of white people, for instance, because the color usually isn’t the same.

However, that’s not always the case. If you start to ask the image processing to classify Albino Gorillas vs Humans:

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Then it might get a little confused again and start giving you white people. In fact, Google quite helpfully gave me this picture of an “Albino Gorilla” when I asked:

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Sure, this man researched Gorillas and so I guess it might seem alright, but one of the “Related Images” is definitely Adam Sandler, and I also got pictures of Ron Perlman.

I wouldn't read too far into it.

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