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Oh the horror! Google Lens' AI will tag young boys as BOYS! It assumes gender!
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Google Lens resurfaces questions about AI and human identity
It can identify boys as boys, but should it?
Today at the company's annual developer conference, Google CEO Sundar Pichai uttered a phrase that will no doubt be repeated in corporate boardrooms across the world for the foreseeable future: "AI first." It wasn't the first we've heard of the formerly "mobile-first" company's focus on artificial intelligence, but Google I/O 2017 marked the first time we saw many of the tools that will back up that new catchphrase.
But it was a quick, innocent enough reference to the company's image-recognition software, preceding the announcement of Google Lens, that should raise some red flags. In trying to appeal to the family women and men in the audience, Pichai revealed that the platform could recognize and tag your "boy" as such when you snap a pic of him blowing out the candles on his birthday cake.
"Similar to speech, we're seeing great improvements in computer vision. So when we look at a picture like this we are able to understand the attributes behind the picture. We realize it's your boy, in a birthday party, there was cake and family involved and your boy was happy. So we can understand all of that better now."
What could possibly be wrong with your camera identifying and tagging your "boy" at this "birthday" and the "woman's" "hands" holding him in front of his "cake"? Well, nothing, if that's really who is in the photo and what is going on. But as Google and other tech giants have proved, AI isn't always as enlightened as the people who created it, and gender identity isn't always visually recognizable. Tagging an image of a boy as "boy" isn't an issue, but what if that child is transgender, gender-fluid or gender-nonconforming? Gender identity, as we've come to learn, is a divisive issue, and a very personal one.
https://www.engadget.com/2017/05/17/...uman-identity/
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Google Lens resurfaces questions about AI and human identity
It can identify boys as boys, but should it?
Today at the company's annual developer conference, Google CEO Sundar Pichai uttered a phrase that will no doubt be repeated in corporate boardrooms across the world for the foreseeable future: "AI first." It wasn't the first we've heard of the formerly "mobile-first" company's focus on artificial intelligence, but Google I/O 2017 marked the first time we saw many of the tools that will back up that new catchphrase.
But it was a quick, innocent enough reference to the company's image-recognition software, preceding the announcement of Google Lens, that should raise some red flags. In trying to appeal to the family women and men in the audience, Pichai revealed that the platform could recognize and tag your "boy" as such when you snap a pic of him blowing out the candles on his birthday cake.
"Similar to speech, we're seeing great improvements in computer vision. So when we look at a picture like this we are able to understand the attributes behind the picture. We realize it's your boy, in a birthday party, there was cake and family involved and your boy was happy. So we can understand all of that better now."
What could possibly be wrong with your camera identifying and tagging your "boy" at this "birthday" and the "woman's" "hands" holding him in front of his "cake"? Well, nothing, if that's really who is in the photo and what is going on. But as Google and other tech giants have proved, AI isn't always as enlightened as the people who created it, and gender identity isn't always visually recognizable. Tagging an image of a boy as "boy" isn't an issue, but what if that child is transgender, gender-fluid or gender-nonconforming? Gender identity, as we've come to learn, is a divisive issue, and a very personal one.
https://www.engadget.com/2017/05/17/...uman-identity/
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