Microsoft ships CaptionBot three weeks after Tay, and it cannot caption Doctor Who
Published · updated · curated by AI Is Going Just Great
Source: theguardian.com ↗
On the ranking of slightly dodgy AIs, not recognising K-9 is a significant step up from "genocidal racist", so congratulations Microsoft.
Three weeks after Tay went racist on Twitter, Microsoft put another AI on the public internet: CaptionBot, a service that writes a caption for any photo you upload and improves based on how you rate its guesses. It stitches together three Cognitive Services APIs. Computer Vision identifies what is in the frame, Bing Image Search supplies context, and Emotion reads any faces for anger, contempt, disgust, fear, happiness, sadness or surprise. Microsoft says the system recognises "a broad range of visual concepts" and does entity extraction well enough to name celebrities. It did correctly identify Taylor Swift and Kanye West.
The Guardian fed it stills from Doctor Who, "with admittedly very little success." One image came back as "a picture of some sort." The internet went straight for the stress tests: Hitler photos to see whether CaptionBot could be baited into racism, and a moon landing picture that one user reported the tool "sees through." CaptionBot also failed to identify K-9.