The computer brain learns everything from its human users—and so it learns all the stereotyping too.
An 18-year-old high school senior from Virginia,
Kabir Alli, shared a video on Twitter showing the discrepancy between
searching for “three black teenagers” versus “three white teenagers” on
Google. While the former pulled up police mugshots, changing one
word—”black” to “white”— yielded smiling, youthful photos.
The video generated a tweetstorm, with over
67,000 retweets and comments from people calling Google out on the
racial bias. This isn’t the first time Google search results have irked
people. Another Twitter user had noticed similarly discriminatory
results when searching for professional and unprofessional hairstyles
for work.
The search giant was also criticized for allowing an anti-semitic Chrome plugin to exi
Alli
does not believe Google is racist but he does expect the company to
bear some responsibility. “I understand it’s all just an algorithm,
based on most visited pages, but Google should be able to have more
control over something like that,” he told USA Today.
The Silicon Valley behemoth maintains that its
search results have very little to do with the company and its
programmers—it’s all about the algorithm. “Algorithms rely on more than
200 unique signals or ‘clues’ that make it possible to guess what you
might really be looking for,” the company says in a blog post, listing things like the freshness of content, your region and page rank as factors.
“Our image search results are a reflection of
content from across the web, including the frequency with which types of
images appear and the way they’re described online,” a Google
spokesperson said. “This means that sometimes unpleasant portrayals of
sensitive subject matter online can affect what image search results
appear for a given query. These results don’t reflect Google’s own
opinions or beliefs–as a company, we strongly value a diversity of
perspectives, ideas and cultures.”
Google is a mirror: The algorithm works
with what it’s given—a persistent bias in society manifests itself in
the online landscape in the form of meta-tagged images.
Alli acknowledged the shortcomings in
his interview with USA Today. “It shouldn’t be so difficult to find
normal non-offensive pictures of three black teenagers. That search sort
of portrays us as a whole and those pictures are not us. We have a lot
to offer and that search does not do us any kind of justice.”
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