- If I entered "person" I'd see a mix of images substantially similar to what I saw using google.co.uk up to and including Terry Crews, which was frankly a little weird, and otherwise mostly white

- If I entered "人", which Google Translate reliably informs me is Japanese for "person", I'd see a few white faces, but a substantial majority of Japanese people

So it seems possible that Google's trying to be smart in showing me images that reflect the ethnic makeup I might expect based on my language and location. I mean, it's doing a pretty imperfect job of it (men are overrepresented, for one) but viewed charitably it's possible that's what's going on.

Is the case for woke outrage against Google Image Search overstated? Possibly; possibly not. After these experiments I honestly don't feel like I have enough data to come to a conclusion either way, although it does seem like they may at least be trying to do a half decent job.

The TL;DR of it is that google crawls the internet for photos, associates those photos with text content pulled from the caption or from the surrounding page, and gives them a popularity score based on the popularity of the page/image. There are some cleverer bits trying to label objects in the images, but it's primarily a reflection of how frequently that image is accessed and how well the text content on the page matches your query. There's some additional localization, anti-spam, and freshness rating that influences the results too.

The majority of pages with "人" and a photo on it that has a machine labeled person image would be a photo of a japanese/chinese person, and if you're being localized to japan with a vpn, that would be even more true.

Google doesn't "know" what you're trying to search. It's a giant pattern matching game that slices and dices and rearranges text to find the closest match.

I'm not disputing that, and it certainly explains why it's "good enough" for somes search queries whilst being totally gimpy for others.

My understanding was that Google does prioritise what it's classified as local search results though, on the basis that they're likely to be more relevant.

"Person without stripes" shows several zebras, tigers, a horse painted like a zebra, and a bunch of people with stripes.

Interestingly, duckduckgo shows me, as second result, an albino tiger with, you guessed it, no stripes. The page title has "[...] with NO stripes [...]" in it, so I assume that helped the algo a bit.

EDIT: I also got the painted horse (it looks spray-painted, if you ask me) and I must admit it's quite funny to look at

Unless things have really changed, [doctor] will be mostly white men and [nurse] will be mostly white and Filipino women.

But don't blame the AI. The AI has no morality. It simply reflects and amplifies the morality of the data it was given.

And in this case the data is the entirety of human knowledge that Google knows about.

So really you can't blame anyone but society for having such deeply engrained biases.

The question to ask is does the programmer of the AI have a moral obligation to change the answer, and if so, guided by whose morality?

Any sort of image search is going to tend to be biased toward stock photos, because those images are well labeled, and often created to match things people search for.

Key point right there. Unless Google is deliberately injecting racial and/or gender bias into their code, which seems extremely far fetched (to put it kindly), the real fault lies with us humans and what we choose to publish on the web.

Nurses it's 34 women to 5 men. Proportions of skin tones are what I'd expect to see in a city in my country.

I would contend that society is biased. There is no evidence that says men are better doctors than women, and in fact what little this has been studied says that women make better doctors than men (and is reflected in the more recent med school graduation classes which are majority women).

So it's a question of what you are asking for when you search for [doctor]. Are you asking for a statistical sampling or are you asking for a set of exemplars?

> So statistically, it would be correct to return mostly male doctors in an image search.

And that's exactly it. The AI has no morality. It's doing exactly what it should, and is amplifying our existing biases.

You can blame statistics for that. Beyond that, you can blame genetics for slightly skewing the gender ratios of certain fields and human social behavior to amplify this gap to an extreme degree.

IMO, wrapping it in a concept like "morality" because the pictures have people in them just serves to excuse the problem and obscure its (otherwise obvious) solution.

(That's how I would do it if I wanted more accurate rather than more general results.)

The next few images contained Donald Trump, Terry Crews, Bill Gates and a French politician named Pierre Person.

After that it was actually quite a varied mix of men/women and color/white people.

I am still not very impressed with Google's search engine in this aspect, but it is not biased in the way you suggest.

At least it is not biased that way for me. As far as I am aware, and I might be completely wrong here, Google, in part, bases its search results on your prior search history and other stored profile information. It is entirely possible that your search results say more about your online profile than about Google engine :)

Well, she was the 2019 Time Person of the Year.

Likewise, Trump was the 2016 choice, and Crews and Gates have been featured as part of a group Person of the Year (“The Silence Breakers” and “The Good Samaritans” respectively).

There's not much diversity, assuming Terry Crews is from USA, then all the first viewport full of images are Western people; except Ms Thunberg they're all from USA AFAICT [I'm in UK].

The first non-Western person would be a Polish dude called Andrzej Person (the second Person called Person in my list after a USA dancer/actress), then Xi Jinping a few lines down. The population in my UK city is such that about 5/30 of my kids primary and secondary school, respectively, classmates have recent Asian (Indian/Pakistani) heritage. So, relative to our population, there are more black people, far fewer Indian-subcontinent no obviously local people.

Interesting for me is there are no boys. I see girls, men and women of various ages but no boys. 7 viewports down there's an anonymous boy in an image for "national short person day". The only other boys in the top 10 pages are [sexual and violent] crime victims.

The adjectives with thumbnails across the top are interesting too - beautiful, fake, anime, attractive, kawaii are women; short, skinny, obese, big [a hugely obese person on a scooter], cute, business are men.