Beverage bias

14 Nov 2017

The UK version of Amazon Prime Photos just added a seemingly magic set of features to bring it to parity with the US version. My digitised photos - or at least, a private cloud-based copy of them - have been lodged there for a while, since unlimited (photo) storage is an included benefit of the aforementioned subscription service.

The new features could loosely be called “AI” - in that Amazon’s computing power has churned over my pixel collection and applied a bit of machine learning: face recognition, object recognition and geolocation deduction. Amazon have some competition in this space from Google Photos, and Apple are in the news because the newest iPhone can be unlocked by facial recognition. Well, these algorithms definitely aren’t good enough authentication right now, but it’s fun seeing 14 thousand photos automatically categorised this way. I can search for “bird” (583, results look good), “mountain” (893, results include a photo of a three year old in a pig sty) or “smile” (537. I think this is way lower than it should be. I’m fortunate to have lots of smiley pictures.)

I note, after clicking on my own face, that following “plant”, “smile”, “baby” and “water”, in the high-frequency co-occurrence list, comes “beverage”.

Cheers!

Tags: ai, photo, personal

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