[voidifremoved]

A while ago, Google photos autogenerated a video for me from my photo library. It was about a minute long, stitched together dozens of photos, called "dog video", and with a horrifying yapping dog soundtrack.

Every single photo was of a cat.

I have to say I was humbled by the amount of human and computing power that had gone into developing this system over the years, that could achieve such a complicated, impressive technical feat, without requiring any effort or money on my part, and yet also be 100% wrong.

[Bartweiss]

> be 100% wrong

This really is quite impressive. It's rare for humans to do worse than random guessing on tasks, and they almost never do much worse. There's something almost charming about the ability of AI to put real effort into actively avoiding correct answers.

[pixl97]

Really it sounds like an error somewhere else, rather than the AI system. More like the ID for cat and dog were switched.

[Bartweiss]

If this is the Google Photos folder system, I suspect the problem was that the IDs and the bucketing were de-linked.

Photos creates folders for you based on identified themes, and then adds new photos to them as they're taken. I haven't checked, but I'm guessing it doesn't relabel existing buckets to avoid causing confusion. And I'm not sure whether bucketing is done by assessing theme or similarity to other photos in a folder. If it's the latter, the system could have hit the confidence threshold to make a Dog folder out of a few images, then ceaselessly dumped similar-looking photos (i.e. cats) into that bucket.