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Is Microsoft’s newest A.I. Bot Transphobic?

  • April 14, 2016
  • 2 min read
Is Microsoft’s newest A.I. Bot Transphobic?

Microsoft has a new A.I. bot. This one appears to be a bit less corruptible than Tay, but that isn’t going to stop the internet from trying. This new bot is called CaptionBot AI and it apparently can “understand the content of any image and [try] to describe it as well as any human”

Some people have submitted some screenshots of their best captioned images already.

Interestingly, it seems to have a filter for online-harassment campaigner, Anita Sarkeesian, and it appears that her images are not analyzed:

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chat bot anita sarkeesian AI

*Note: Sometime after this post was published, someone pointed out that CaptionBot AI did recognize that Anita was a “lady” and it also labeled her facial expression:

anita sarkeesian 4

Perhaps the bot had trouble identifying Anita’s face as human, initially.

CaptionBot AI did have some humorous results. For example someone uploaded Goatse (most of the image is blocked out for obvious reasons):

goatse

And here is one about Jared Fogle from Subway:

jared fogle subway

But here’s where things become problematic. When uploading photos of Caitlyn Jenner (the male-to-female transgender person formerly known as Bruce Jenner), Microsoft does not always recognize her as female:

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In a day where people are culturally sensitive to gender pronouns, it is somewhat surprising that Microsoft did not take this into consideration when assigning genders to photos.

The bot does appear to have some facial-recognition capabilities, for example it recognized “Carrot Top”:

carrot top

We were surprised it was able to fully recognize Carrot Top, but not recognize Caitlyn Jenner as a female.

Do you have any interesting screenshots from Caption Bot A.I.? Tweet them to @socialhax and we might feature them here.

*Note: shortly after this post was made, Caption Bot A.I. seemed to have added Caitlyn Jenner to it’s facial recognition database and is now recognizing her.

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