In this year of AI hoopla, I’m reminded of a story that in early 'training sets’ of images fed to AI’s there were too many pictures of giraffes. Which raises the question: What exactly is the right amount of giraffes in a training set? In honor of this philosophical conundrum, I wish you all a merry Christmas with a triumvirate of Santa, wise-men, and giraffes.
Photograph by Christine Wertheim of a window display in a thrift store in Wagga Wagga, Australia.
I am indebted to Janelle Shane of the ever-wondrous AI Weirdness newsletter for this story about the overabundance of camelopardlais in AI training sets. Apparently the reason behind this is that tech researchers tend to have both the money and interest to go on safaris, and since a lot of their own photos made it into AI training sets their interests – and wealth – were well represented.