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I couldn't quite believe your comment when I read it so I did a Google image search for "person" and the results weren't a lot better than you'd suggested. Most

I couldn't quite believe your comment when I read it so I did a Google image search for "person" and the results weren't a lot better than you'd suggested. Mostly white men, a few white women, a very few black women, a handful of Asians, and multiple instances of Terry Crews. The net result of that Google search, combined with the "Shirt Without Stripes" repo, leaves me even more unimpressed with the capabilities of our AI overlords.

tines 7y ago
I think the skewing of results lessening your impressed-ness is the wrong takeaway. If anything, the AI is a more perfect mirror of the society it learned from than you expected. Perhaps the right way to look at it is that we are capable of producing things that we don't understand, that are more sophisticated than we realize.
- bartread 7y ago
  You may be right. It's been bugging me since I posted earlier on so I fired up a VPN with an endpoint in Japan, along with a private browsing session in Firefox, to see if I got different results. As it happens the results were interesting: - If I entered "person" I'd see a mix of images substantially similar to what I saw using google.co.uk up to and including Terry Crews, which was frankly a little weird, and otherwise mostly white - If I entered "人", which Google Translate reliably informs me is Japanese for "person", I'd see a few white faces, but a substantial majority of Japanese people So it seems possible that Google's trying to be smart in showing me images that reflect the ethnic makeup I might expect based on my language and location. I mean, it's doing a pretty imperfect job of it (men are overrepresented, for one) but viewed charitably it's possible that's what's going on. Is the case for woke outrage against Google Image Search overstated? Possibly; possibly not. After these experiments I honestly don't feel like I have enough data to come to a conclusion either way, although it does seem like they may at least be trying to do a half decent job.
  - cowmoo728 7y ago
    This seems like you're attributing motive to google here, but I don't believe that's right. For example, Terry Crews appears in the query "person" because his "TIME Person of the Year 2017 Interview" article was very popular online. I get a lot of Greta Thunberg because she was TIME Person of the Year 2019 and received similar online attention because of Donald Trump. The TL;DR of it is that google crawls the internet for photos, associates those photos with text content pulled from the caption or from the surrounding page, and gives them a popularity score based on the popularity of the page/image. There are some cleverer bits trying to label objects in the images, but it's primarily a reflection of how frequently that image is accessed and how well the text content on the page matches your query. There's some additional localization, anti-spam, and freshness rating that influences the results too. The majority of pages with "人" and a photo on it that has a machine labeled person image would be a photo of a japanese/chinese person, and if you're being localized to japan with a vpn, that would be even more true. Google doesn't "know" what you're trying to search. It's a giant pattern matching game that slices and dices and rearranges text to find the closest match.
    - bartread 7y ago
      > Google doesn't "know" what you're trying to search. It's a giant pattern matching game that slices and dices and rearranges text to find the closest match. I'm not disputing that, and it certainly explains why it's "good enough" for somes search queries whilst being totally gimpy for others. My understanding was that Google does prioritise what it's classified as local search results though, on the basis that they're likely to be more relevant.
- Traster 7y ago
  This is the problem though, all those companies are advertising fantastical results. They aren't saying "Hey! We spent billions of dollars so our algorithm could be as racist as your uncle Steve!". Oh and by the way, Steve is now right - because all the crimes he ever finds out about are by black people, because that's what Google has decided he wants to see. So it's no longer him seeking out ways of justifying his latent racist tendencies, no, he's outsourced that to Google.
MadWombat 7y ago
I just did a google image search for "person". The first 5 images were of Greta Thunberg. She must be the most representative person ever. The next few images contained Donald Trump, Terry Crews, Bill Gates and a French politician named Pierre Person. After that it was actually quite a varied mix of men/women and color/white people. I am still not very impressed with Google's search engine in this aspect, but it is not biased in the way you suggest. At least it is not biased that way for me. As far as I am aware, and I might be completely wrong here, Google, in part, bases its search results on your prior search history and other stored profile information. It is entirely possible that your search results say more about your online profile than about Google engine :)
- wolfgang42 7y ago
  > The first 5 images were of Greta Thunberg. She must be the most representative person ever. Well, she was the 2019 Time Person of the Year. Likewise, Trump was the 2016 choice, and Crews and Gates have been featured as part of a group Person of the Year (“The Silence Breakers” and “The Good Samaritans” respectively).
mcbits 7y ago
Bing results, "person" shows stick figure drawings, Pearson Education logos, Person of the Year, people named Person, etc. "Person without stripes" shows several zebras, tigers, a horse painted like a zebra, and a bunch of people with stripes.
- DarkWiiPlayer 7y ago
  > "Person without stripes" Interestingly, duckduckgo shows me, as second result, an albino tiger with, you guessed it, no stripes. The page title has "[...] with NO stripes [...]" in it, so I assume that helped the algo a bit. EDIT: I also got the painted horse (it looks spray-painted, if you ask me) and I must admit it's quite funny to look at
jedberg 7y ago
If you really want to be disappointed, search for [doctor] and [nurse]. Unless things have really changed, [doctor] will be mostly white men and [nurse] will be mostly white and Filipino women. But don't blame the AI. The AI has no morality. It simply reflects and amplifies the morality of the data it was given. And in this case the data is the entirety of human knowledge that Google knows about. So really you can't blame anyone but society for having such deeply engrained biases. The question to ask is does the programmer of the AI have a moral obligation to change the answer, and if so, guided by whose morality?
- ryaan_anthony 7y ago
  What does the color of people's skin in search results have to do with morality? I was raised not to see color, now we have this "progressive" movement hell bent on manipulating search results to disproportionately represent minorities. If you want to filter your search results based on the color of skin you can do that easily.
- bartread 7y ago
  > The AI has no morality. It simply reflects and amplifies the morality of the data it was given. Key point right there. Unless Google is deliberately injecting racial and/or gender bias into their code, which seems extremely far fetched (to put it kindly), the real fault lies with us humans and what we choose to publish on the web.
- encom 7y ago
  What bias? Who is biased? Quick duckduckgoing indicates there are far more male than female doctors in the US. So statistically, it would be correct to return mostly male doctors in an image search. If you want a photo of a specifically gendered doctor, it's not hard to specify. Not really seeing a problem here.
  - jedberg 7y ago
    > What bias? Who is biased? I would contend that society is biased. There is no evidence that says men are better doctors than women, and in fact what little this has been studied says that women make better doctors than men (and is reflected in the more recent med school graduation classes which are majority women). So it's a question of what you are asking for when you search for [doctor]. Are you asking for a statistical sampling or are you asking for a set of exemplars? > So statistically, it would be correct to return mostly male doctors in an image search. And that's exactly it. The AI has no morality. It's doing exactly what it should, and is amplifying our existing biases.
hodgesrm 7y ago
I tried this as well in an incognito window on Firefox and got the results you mentioned. I notice, however, that virtually all of the results have associated text containing the word person. It seems likely that Google image search featurizes photographs to include surrounding document context. (That's how I would do it if I wanted more accurate rather than more general results.)
pbhjpbhj 7y ago
4 of my top 7 images (the top line) are Greta Thunberg in a search for "person". First viewport is 11 men, 11 women, 1 stick person, of which there are 4 Thunbergs, 4 Trumps, 2 Crews. People seem to be if they got major "person" awards like "most powerful person" or "person of the year". There's not much diversity, assuming Terry Crews is from USA, then all the first viewport full of images are Western people; except Ms Thunberg they're all from USA AFAICT [I'm in UK]. The first non-Western person would be a Polish dude called Andrzej Person (the second Person called Person in my list after a USA dancer/actress), then Xi Jinping a few lines down. The population in my UK city is such that about 5/30 of my kids primary and secondary school, respectively, classmates have recent Asian (Indian/Pakistani) heritage. So, relative to our population, there are more black people, far fewer Indian-subcontinent no obviously local people. Interesting for me is there are no boys. I see girls, men and women of various ages but no boys. 7 viewports down there's an anonymous boy in an image for "national short person day". The only other boys in the top 10 pages are [sexual and violent] crime victims. The adjectives with thumbnails across the top are interesting too - beautiful, fake, anime, attractive, kawaii are women; short, skinny, obese, big [a hugely obese person on a scooter], cute, business are men.
chrischen 7y ago
AI can't fix society's problems. AI merely reflects them back.
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
lobotryas 7y ago
I don’t understand why AI or a search engine had to meet your or anyone’s expectations for diversity. If I searched for “shirt” and didn’t get shirt pictures in the color I wanted I would just tune my query instead.

tines 7y ago

I think the skewing of results lessening your impressed-ness is the wrong takeaway. If anything, the AI is a more perfect mirror of the society it learned from than you expected. Perhaps the right way to look at it is that we are capable of producing things that we don't understand, that are more sophisticated than we realize.

bartread 7y ago
You may be right. It's been bugging me since I posted earlier on so I fired up a VPN with an endpoint in Japan, along with a private browsing session in Firefox, to see if I got different results. As it happens the results were interesting: - If I entered "person" I'd see a mix of images substantially similar to what I saw using google.co.uk up to and including Terry Crews, which was frankly a little weird, and otherwise mostly white - If I entered "人", which Google Translate reliably informs me is Japanese for "person", I'd see a few white faces, but a substantial majority of Japanese people So it seems possible that Google's trying to be smart in showing me images that reflect the ethnic makeup I might expect based on my language and location. I mean, it's doing a pretty imperfect job of it (men are overrepresented, for one) but viewed charitably it's possible that's what's going on. Is the case for woke outrage against Google Image Search overstated? Possibly; possibly not. After these experiments I honestly don't feel like I have enough data to come to a conclusion either way, although it does seem like they may at least be trying to do a half decent job.
- cowmoo728 7y ago
  This seems like you're attributing motive to google here, but I don't believe that's right. For example, Terry Crews appears in the query "person" because his "TIME Person of the Year 2017 Interview" article was very popular online. I get a lot of Greta Thunberg because she was TIME Person of the Year 2019 and received similar online attention because of Donald Trump. The TL;DR of it is that google crawls the internet for photos, associates those photos with text content pulled from the caption or from the surrounding page, and gives them a popularity score based on the popularity of the page/image. There are some cleverer bits trying to label objects in the images, but it's primarily a reflection of how frequently that image is accessed and how well the text content on the page matches your query. There's some additional localization, anti-spam, and freshness rating that influences the results too. The majority of pages with "人" and a photo on it that has a machine labeled person image would be a photo of a japanese/chinese person, and if you're being localized to japan with a vpn, that would be even more true. Google doesn't "know" what you're trying to search. It's a giant pattern matching game that slices and dices and rearranges text to find the closest match.
  - bartread 7y ago
    > Google doesn't "know" what you're trying to search. It's a giant pattern matching game that slices and dices and rearranges text to find the closest match. I'm not disputing that, and it certainly explains why it's "good enough" for somes search queries whilst being totally gimpy for others. My understanding was that Google does prioritise what it's classified as local search results though, on the basis that they're likely to be more relevant.
Traster 7y ago
This is the problem though, all those companies are advertising fantastical results. They aren't saying "Hey! We spent billions of dollars so our algorithm could be as racist as your uncle Steve!". Oh and by the way, Steve is now right - because all the crimes he ever finds out about are by black people, because that's what Google has decided he wants to see. So it's no longer him seeking out ways of justifying his latent racist tendencies, no, he's outsourced that to Google.

MadWombat 7y ago

I just did a google image search for "person". The first 5 images were of Greta Thunberg. She must be the most representative person ever. The next few images contained Donald Trump, Terry Crews, Bill Gates and a French politician named Pierre Person. After that it was actually quite a varied mix of men/women and color/white people. I am still not very impressed with Google's search engine in this aspect, but it is not biased in the way you suggest. At least it is not biased that way for me. As far as I am aware, and I might be completely wrong here, Google, in part, bases its search results on your prior search history and other stored profile information. It is entirely possible that your search results say more about your online profile than about Google engine :)

wolfgang42 7y ago
> The first 5 images were of Greta Thunberg. She must be the most representative person ever. Well, she was the 2019 Time Person of the Year. Likewise, Trump was the 2016 choice, and Crews and Gates have been featured as part of a group Person of the Year (“The Silence Breakers” and “The Good Samaritans” respectively).

mcbits 7y ago

Bing results, "person" shows stick figure drawings, Pearson Education logos, Person of the Year, people named Person, etc. "Person without stripes" shows several zebras, tigers, a horse painted like a zebra, and a bunch of people with stripes.

DarkWiiPlayer 7y ago
> "Person without stripes" Interestingly, duckduckgo shows me, as second result, an albino tiger with, you guessed it, no stripes. The page title has "[...] with NO stripes [...]" in it, so I assume that helped the algo a bit. EDIT: I also got the painted horse (it looks spray-painted, if you ask me) and I must admit it's quite funny to look at

jedberg 7y ago

If you really want to be disappointed, search for [doctor] and [nurse]. Unless things have really changed, [doctor] will be mostly white men and [nurse] will be mostly white and Filipino women. But don't blame the AI. The AI has no morality. It simply reflects and amplifies the morality of the data it was given. And in this case the data is the entirety of human knowledge that Google knows about. So really you can't blame anyone but society for having such deeply engrained biases. The question to ask is does the programmer of the AI have a moral obligation to change the answer, and if so, guided by whose morality?

ryaan_anthony 7y ago
What does the color of people's skin in search results have to do with morality? I was raised not to see color, now we have this "progressive" movement hell bent on manipulating search results to disproportionately represent minorities. If you want to filter your search results based on the color of skin you can do that easily.
bartread 7y ago
> The AI has no morality. It simply reflects and amplifies the morality of the data it was given. Key point right there. Unless Google is deliberately injecting racial and/or gender bias into their code, which seems extremely far fetched (to put it kindly), the real fault lies with us humans and what we choose to publish on the web.
encom 7y ago
What bias? Who is biased? Quick duckduckgoing indicates there are far more male than female doctors in the US. So statistically, it would be correct to return mostly male doctors in an image search. If you want a photo of a specifically gendered doctor, it's not hard to specify. Not really seeing a problem here.
- jedberg 7y ago
  > What bias? Who is biased? I would contend that society is biased. There is no evidence that says men are better doctors than women, and in fact what little this has been studied says that women make better doctors than men (and is reflected in the more recent med school graduation classes which are majority women). So it's a question of what you are asking for when you search for [doctor]. Are you asking for a statistical sampling or are you asking for a set of exemplars? > So statistically, it would be correct to return mostly male doctors in an image search. And that's exactly it. The AI has no morality. It's doing exactly what it should, and is amplifying our existing biases.

hodgesrm 7y ago

I tried this as well in an incognito window on Firefox and got the results you mentioned. I notice, however, that virtually all of the results have associated text containing the word person. It seems likely that Google image search featurizes photographs to include surrounding document context. (That's how I would do it if I wanted more accurate rather than more general results.)

pbhjpbhj 7y ago

4 of my top 7 images (the top line) are Greta Thunberg in a search for "person". First viewport is 11 men, 11 women, 1 stick person, of which there are 4 Thunbergs, 4 Trumps, 2 Crews. People seem to be if they got major "person" awards like "most powerful person" or "person of the year". There's not much diversity, assuming Terry Crews is from USA, then all the first viewport full of images are Western people; except Ms Thunberg they're all from USA AFAICT [I'm in UK]. The first non-Western person would be a Polish dude called Andrzej Person (the second Person called Person in my list after a USA dancer/actress), then Xi Jinping a few lines down. The population in my UK city is such that about 5/30 of my kids primary and secondary school, respectively, classmates have recent Asian (Indian/Pakistani) heritage. So, relative to our population, there are more black people, far fewer Indian-subcontinent no obviously local people. Interesting for me is there are no boys. I see girls, men and women of various ages but no boys. 7 viewports down there's an anonymous boy in an image for "national short person day". The only other boys in the top 10 pages are [sexual and violent] crime victims. The adjectives with thumbnails across the top are interesting too - beautiful, fake, anime, attractive, kawaii are women; short, skinny, obese, big [a hugely obese person on a scooter], cute, business are men.

chrischen 7y ago

AI can't fix society's problems. AI merely reflects them back.

deleted 7y ago

[deleted]

lobotryas 7y ago

I don’t understand why AI or a search engine had to meet your or anyone’s expectations for diversity. If I searched for “shirt” and didn’t get shirt pictures in the color I wanted I would just tune my query instead.