• Hey, guest user. Hope you're enjoying NeoGAF! Have you considered registering for an account? Come join us and add your take to the daily discourse.

Google AI tool will no longer use gendered labels like ‘woman’ or ‘man’ in photos of people

Bullet Club

Banned
Google AI tool will no longer use gendered labels like ‘woman’ or ‘man’ in photos of people

Google’s Cloud Vision API will tag images as ‘person’ to thwart bias

An artificial intelligence tool Google provides to developers won’t add gender labels to images anymore, saying a person’s gender can’t be determined just by how they look in a photo, Business Insider reports.

The company emailed developers today about the change to its widely used Cloud Vision API tool, which uses AI to analyze images and identify faces, landmarks, explicit content, and other recognizable features. Instead of using “man” or “woman” to identify images, Google will tag such images with labels like “person,” as part of its larger effort to avoid instilling AI algorithms with human bias.

In the email to developers announcing the change, Google cited its own AI guidelines, Business Insider reports. “Given that a person’s gender cannot be inferred by appearance, we have decided to remove these labels in order to align with the Artificial Intelligence Principles at Google, specifically Principle #2: Avoid creating or reinforcing unfair bias.”

AI image recognition has been a thorny issue for Google in the past. In 2015, a software engineer noted that Google Photos’ image recognition algorithms were categorizing his black friends as “gorillas.” Google promised to fix the issue, but a follow-up report by Wired in 2018 found Google had blocked its AI from recognizing gorillas and had not done much else to address the problem at its core.

Google released its AI principles in 2018, in response to backlash from Google employees, who protested the company’s work on a Pentagon drone project. The company pledged not to develop AI-powered weaponry, and it also outlined a number of principles, such as the one referenced above, to address issues of bias, oversight, and other potential ethical issues in its future development of the technology.

Source: The Verge
 

pulga

Banned
Seems like a sensible proposition, would be interested to know what their current identifiers are
 
qBAa43y.jpg
 

Mistake

Member
A lead engineer was recently interviewed on the policy changes:
“Well the drones were updated to distinguish between turbans and hijabs, so gender codes weren’t necessary anymore”
 

Papa

Banned
Seems like a sensible proposition, would be interested to know what their current identifiers are

Can you just fuck off back to Resetera already please. Getting sick of your constant whining and metacommentary even though 99% of your posts are in the Ree thread. The one time you venture out is to cheer for current_year gender nonsense 😂 There are shitposters and then there are shit posters. You are a shit poster.
 

Amory

Member
You really have to admire the speed and efficiency of this movement.

5 years ago you'd be dismissed at best and ridiculed at worst for insisting we all ignore biological sex when making an assumption about gender.

5 years from now it'll probably be illegal to do so.
 
This is dangerous and is happening rapidly in a number of AI spaces. Basically, AI models are slowly driving more and more of how our world is run and categorized, by they are heavily politically curated to systematically erase notions of gender, etcetera. There are even linguists working on language AI (NLP) that are carefully trying to remove all gendered meanings from common language--basically systematically excising the essential masculine / feminine metaphors that underlie much of our thought. It should be seen as an assault on our humanity--screw these tech orgs.
 
I've been listening to the History of Rome podcast with Mike Duncan, and also watching Vikings on Netflix, (which makes me an expert on the topic, right), and basically we have always been man and woman, throughout the ages. It's just our modern day society that is choosing to act like this, pretending "gender cannot be inferred by appearance". It's just a fad. True nature will out, and we can go back to normal again. I guess all this shit is just a by-product of not worrying about being killed by an axe or a spear daily.

The weird thing is they are right in one way about gender not being able to be inferred by image. It is possible a man can be mistaken for a woman in a photo etc. But this shouldn't be a problem on the surface. It's ok to correct as a human and life can never ever be perfect.
 
Last edited:

Bogey

Banned
This victory is meaningless so long as they continue to use binary to code.

Why do you think they're pouring all their money into quantum computing?

An infinite, fluent state of q-bits, 0 and 1 at the same token, and everything in between! Now let's rename that thing to lgbtq-bit and we're set!
 

TUROK

Member
Can you just fuck off back to Resetera already please. Getting sick of your constant whining and metacommentary even though 99% of your posts are in the Ree thread. The one time you venture out is to cheer for current_year gender nonsense 😂 There are shitposters and then there are shit posters. You are a shit poster.

Hey, they made a thread about you.
 

brap

Banned

Hey, they made a thread about you.
I'm glad you realized that matt's post is also about you.
 
Top Bottom