Monday, December 28, 2015

How Google Sees Me

I have been very amused by the results of searching for a photo of myself on Google. The picture which I searched for online was bare-chested, and perhaps I should say I am white with a shaved head and tattoos, to give you some idea of the image I looked for.
I was very chuffed that this chap came up among the searches multiple times as he is probably the closest to looking like me. I'm also very impressed that a man whose personal interest should so dominate his life should be visually like me. What matter if his interest happens to be Miley Cyrus, no harm in a man riding his own hobby horse.
This man is more like my body shape and his tattoos are in a similar placement to mine, so I can see why this would be selected of online images as looking like me. It was after this it started to go horribly wrong.
I can see what happened here,  Google picked up on some key elements of my appearance and focused the search on them. Nonetheless neither of these men actually looks particularly like the picture I searched online for.

Where did the chest hair come from? I've always wanted to be really hairy, but this isn't what I look like.

No. With the best will in the world,  these two could never have been mistaken for me at any point in my life.

Trying to tell me something, Google?
Oh, please. Given that these images are supposed to be visually similar to me, even without the question of ethnicity, Google seems to have a slight problem recognising skin tone.
...as well as gender and clothing. I'm not orange! Any suggestions for a sensible search engine will be gratefully received!

2 comments:

  1. Yikes! What a selection. Did you search using a text description, or by using the actual photo?

    Oh, and did you have tin foil stuffed down your pants?!?

    ReplyDelete
  2. The description that would get these results is quite something! I searched using the image; obviously I have some tinfoil stuck somewhere which has skewed the results...

    ReplyDelete

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