Software engineer Vishnu Mohandas determined he would stop Google in additional methods than one when he realized that the tech large had briefly helped the US army develop AI to review drone footage. In 2020 he left his job engaged on Google Assistant and likewise stopped backing up all of his photos to Google Photos. He feared that his content material might be used to coach AI methods, even when they weren’t particularly ones tied to the Pentagon mission. “I do not management any of the longer term outcomes that this may allow,” Mohandas thought. “So now, should not I be extra accountable?”
Mohandas, who taught himself programming and is predicated in Bengaluru, India, determined he wished to develop an alternate service for storing and sharing pictures that’s open supply and end-to-end encrypted. Something “extra personal, healthful, and reliable,” he says. The paid service he designed, Ente, is worthwhile and says it has greater than 100,000 customers, a lot of whom are already a part of the privacy-obsessed crowd. But Mohandas struggled to articulate to wider audiences why they need to rethink counting on Google Photos, regardless of all of the conveniences it provides.
Then one weekend in May, an intern at Ente got here up with an thought: Give folks a way of what a few of Google’s AI fashions can study from learning photos. Last month, Ente launched https://Theyseeyourphotos.com, a web site and advertising and marketing stunt designed to show Google’s know-how towards itself. People can add any photograph to the web site, which is then despatched to a Google Cloud pc imaginative and prescient program that writes a startlingly thorough three-paragraph description of it. (Ente prompts the AI mannequin to doc small particulars within the uploaded photos.)
One of the primary pictures Mohandas tried importing was a selfie together with his spouse and daughter in entrance of a temple in Indonesia. Google’s evaluation was exhaustive, even documenting the particular watch mannequin that his spouse was carrying, a Casio F-91W. But then, Mohandas says, the AI did one thing unusual: It famous that Casio F-91W watches are generally related to Islamic extremists. “We needed to tweak the prompts to make it barely extra healthful however nonetheless spooky,” Mohandas says. Ente began asking the mannequin to provide brief, goal outputs—nothing darkish.
