Miserable, care and generous. These adjectives describe two important parts of my life; My late grandmother Anna, and my wife’s late dogs. These are the places where similarities end, but not according to Apple’s photo app.
My family never believed what was Anna’s age when he died. In the early 20th century, birth certificates Ghana often used to come months or years late, or not at all, with suspected accuracy. She lived for a long time, who received a customary birthday card from His Excellency the Queen for Sennairs, which was a recognition of her birth in Freedom Ghana.
I am not only mentioning it to remind us about a great woman, but because Anna shared a feature that the machine has difficulty in classifying both learning models and AI algorithms specifically; Anna was black.
This issue is not new. Google notorious tagged an African American doubles as a gorilla 10 years ago, it was forced to forgive and release a quick software updates that removed the capacity for their equipment to identify the animal.
10 years later, we are in a similar position and it is unfortunate that in both cases, misunderstanding carries a double, derogatory meaning, which makes the wrong positive and more upset.
When I was composing and editing the picture below, I deliberately decided to emphasize Anna’s dark skin tone, which was against her white shirt in an attempt to help tell the story of a century, which lived a remote, long life, clarified through qualities that this black and white image pronounces in wrinkles on her hands and face.
To respect his humanity, I ironic these artistic options that Apple is likely to confuse the detection algorithm, making it incorrectly as something other than humans.
On the other hand, Baki (below), is very clearly canine. On this occasion, when my wife is feeling down, I look for some pictures of ‘man’, which have become very comfortable with me being more comfortable in the list of the most important people of my life. He was a dog who made me like dogs, I was very fond of him, and thus the “dog” always has a frequent discovery on my iPhone.
As a technologist and photographer, I do not want any compensation from Apple. Technology is a science and no science is ever correct. The mistake is terrible, but it is limited to an image in a photo library where Anna exists several times.
However, I apologize as a software update to present a simple solution for the immediate issue. At this time, there is no way to tell my iPhone that it has emerged a wrong positive in search. Thus, at any time I search for “dog”, this image will appear until I remove the image from my library. The option to send the image to Apple will also be a welcome to help train its algorithm so that the issue which seems to be particularly prevalent on images of black people can be avoided in the future.
My grandmother was not a dog. She was a century with a century with intelligence in every line on her face, which lived for freedom through colonial rule, and who raised the generations of my family with love and dignity. The technology which fails to recognize his humanity is the same technique that promises to improve our world. It is a high time that it learned to see all of us clearly.
Disclosure: In the past, William Demian worked part -time in an Apple retail location. The opinion expressed above is only by the author.
