[dwyerm]

This reminds me of Janelle C. Shane's work on AI[1]. Computer vision's been learning based on the photos that people take, not the visions that people see, and this is giving AI a preference for photogenics instead of reality.

People generally don't take pictures of rolling green hillsides. But they very often take pictures of rolling green hillsides with sheep on them. So if you ask the robot to draw a picture of rolling green hillsides, it will include sheep. Or, if you ask it to draw a picture of the savanna, it will want to include giraffes.

Now you're being asked to find a bus in a photo without a bus because it's a street scene, and every street scene has a bus in it.

I haven't read her book, yet, but her Twitter[2] is often full of amusing anecdotes like this.

[1] https://aiweirdness.com/

[2] https://twitter.com/JanelleCShane

[Wowfunhappy]

> People generally don't take pictures of rolling green hillsides. But they very often take pictures of rolling green hillsides with sheep on them. So if you ask the robot to draw a picture of rolling green hillsides, it will include sheep. Or, if you ask it to draw a picture of the savanna, it will want to include giraffes.

Don't humans do this too, though? If I asked someone to draw a picture of rolling green hills, they may well add sheep as an additional detail.

[dwyerm]

Well, personally, I had the "bliss" image from the Windows wallpaper collection in my head while I was writing this. But I'm cognizant that most of the photos of hillsides I took in Ireland had sheep in them.

[Wowfunhappy]

I wonder if that would still be true, though, if "bliss" wasn't a default Windows wallpaper. In other words, you're still referring to common pictures, you're just particularly biased to one in particular that you've seen a lot.

I haven't done the experiment, but I'd posit that if you walked up to a group of 8-year-old children, gave them crayons, and asked them to draw pictures of "rolling hills", a significant portion would add sheep, cows, flowers, or some other details—even though a majority of rolling hills in the world don't have any of these features.

[braythwayt]

Thank you, I ordered her book on the strength of your comment!