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Comment by exporectomy | Hacker News Reader

Gorillas have black and human-like faces. I think they're just quite similar so AI can more easily confuse them.

I’m fairly certain if you showed pictures of both groups to a toddler they’d be able to sort them correctly. It’s really not hard for a human to tell the difference. Which tells me that FB’s AI isn’t really that great.

I saw another article which included a screenshot of the mistake on facebook. The photo is blurry, and contains a side view of the person and iirc the backdrop is in nature. The main indicator that it was a person was the fact they were wearing clothing. Clearly the AI is not good enough, but I will admit that the data it was working on is tricky to achieve perfect accuracy.

The article I saw with the screenshot was from NYTimes:

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/09/03/technology/facebook-ai-ra...

Human-like really depends on your interpretation. That's a generous reading of what's going on. If you google Gorilla faces, I don't think you would be confused.

The AI is not that smart and these examples show it.

Us humans are super good at distinguishing faces. So what's obviously different to us might not be so clear to an AI or another species.

>Us humans are super good at distinguishing faces.

It would be interesting to test a bunch of midwesterners at their ability to tell Asians apart or to be able to distinguish various Asian ethnicities. My guess is that a lot of the distinguishing features that they look for are altered or missing.

And while that is probably true for most of us and gorilla faces, even those midwesterners would easily distinguish an Asian person from a Gorilla.

It's true that we're good at recognizing faces (even where there are none), and distinguishing on a basic level (type of animal) but specific faces are mostly cultural.

Us humans can tell the difference between a human eye and a gorilla eye 100% of the time because it's incredibly easy.

What a silly claim. If there was a way we could easily put money on that, I'd have no trouble finding an example to prove you wrong.

Is it even a confusion?

Humans are primates. It's weird that it selected such a broad label, but it didn't select an incorrect label.

"Human supremacist" attitudes are incredibly common. Look at any discussion of animal intelligence and you'll see the most vehement denials of any possibility that our cognition and emotions aren't unique in the world.

Now you've made me wonder what it thinks about albino gorillas.

e: I assume something similar has been done before by training a model on brown/black bears then throwing polar bears at it. Anyone know the outcome?

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