The ImageNet Roulette challenge will tell you your stereotype and it's savage

17 September 2019, 14:19

By Nicky Idika

People are entering their selfies in ImageNet Roulette to find out what their stereotypes and "labels" are.

Artificial intelligence is already deeply woven into our way of life. It's in our homes (hi, Siri and Alexa!), at our jobs, and even in the cars we drive. Machines are also learning from images and a website called imagenet-roulette is using labels (some not so great) to classify people based on what they look like.

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ImageNet is a bit of fun, but it's also a part of an exhibit from AI researchers Trevor Paglen and Kate Crawford. The website is simple to use, just upload a photo of yourself and the website will spit out a category/label it thinks you fall into based on your appearance. FYI, the site promises that it "does not store the photos people upload".

ImageNet roulette "classifies" people with some, err, interesting adjectives.

While there are some pretty standard labels (I put a photo of myself and the label "black woman" came back, go figure) some are a lot more unconventional.

A stock photo of a young brunette woman returned the labels "knockout" "ravisher" and "beauty" which...ok.

Meanwhile, the stock photo of these two pals came up with "orphan" and "weirdo".

It's not clear how someone can look like an orphan or what identifiers the website uses to label such a person.

The Telegraph also points out that the site is being "slammed" for offensive descriptors like "negro", "negroid" and "blackamore". Not great!

ImageNet admits that it "contains a number of problematic, offensive and bizarre categories" and that "some use misogynistic or racist terminology". This, they say, is to "shed light on what happens when technical systems are trained on problematic training data".

People on social media are playing around with the website to see what turns up when they upload their own selfies and photographs.

What do you guys think of ImageNet? What comes up when you enter your photo?