Kind, caring, and generous. These adjectives describe two important parts of my life; my late grandmother Anna, and my wife’s late dog Buckeye. These are where the similarities end, but not according to Apple’s Photos app.
My family has never been sure what age Anna was when she passed away. Birth certificates in early 20th century Ghana often came months or years late, or not at all, with questionable accuracy. She lived long enough to receive the customary birthday card from Her Majesty the Queen for centenarians, a recognition of her birth in pre-independence Ghana.
I mention this not just to reminisce about a great lady, but because Anna shared a trait that both Machine Learning models and AI algorithms have particular trouble categorizing; Anna was black.
This issue is not new. Google infamously tagged an African American couple as gorillas 10 years ago, forcing it to issue an apology and a quick software update that removed the ability for its devices to identify the animal.
10 years later, we are in a similar position and it is unfortunate that in both cases, the mischaracterization carries a double, derogatory meaning making the false positive all the more upsetting.
When I was composing and editing the photograph below, I had decided to deliberately emphasize Anna’s dark skin tones contrasted against her white shirt in an effort to help tell the story of a centenarian who had lived a storied, long life, evident through the qualities that this black and white image accentuates in the wrinkles on her hand and face.
These artistic choices I made to honor her humanity are ironically what likely confused Apple’s detection algorithms, causing it to misidentify her as something other than human.
Buckeye (below), on the other hand, is very obviously canine. On occasion when my wife is feeling down, I look for some photos of the ‘man’ who I have very much become comfortable with being higher than me in the list of the most important people in her life. He was the dog that made me like dogs after all, I was very fond of him, and thus “dog” is always a frequent search on my iPhone.
As both a technologist and photographer, I seek no compensation from Apple. Technology is a science and no science is ever perfect. The mistake is dreadful, but it is limited to one image in a photo library where Anna exists multiple times.
I do, however, seek an apology in the form of a software update to introduce a simple solution to the immediate issue. At this time, there is no way to tell my iPhone that it has surfaced a false positive in the search. Thus, any time I search for “dog” this image will appear unless I delete the image from my library. The option to send the image to Apple would also be a welcome ask so that it can be used to help train its algorithms so that this issue that seems to be especially prevalent on images of black people can be avoided in the future.
My grandmother was not a dog. She was a centenarian with wisdom etched in every line on her face, who lived through colonial rule to independence, and who raised generations of my family with love and dignity. The technology that fails to recognize her humanity is the same technology that promises to make our world better. It is high time it learned to see all of us clearly.
Disclosure: In the past, William Damien worked part-time at an Apple retail location. The opinions expressed above are solely those of the author.
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