You Look Like a Thing and I Love You: How Artificial Intelligence Works and Why It's Making the World a Weirder Place

by Janelle Shane

Among the community of AI researchers and enthusiasts, AI has a reputation for seeing giraffes everywhere. Given a random photo of an uninteresting bit of landscape—a pond, for example, or some trees—AI will tend to report the presence of giraffes. The effect is so common that internet security expert Melissa Elliott suggested the term giraffing for the phenomenon of AI overreporting relatively rare sights.7 The reason for this has to do with the data the AI is trained on. Though giraffes are uncommon, people are much more likely to photograph a giraffe (“Hey, cool, a giraffe!”) than a random boring bit of landscape. The big free-to-use image datasets that so many AI researchers train their algorithms on tend to have images of lots of different animals, but few, if any, pictures of plain dirt or plain trees. An AI that studies this dataset will learn that giraffes are more common than empty fields and will adjust its predictions accordingly.