Software program engineer Vishnu Mohandas determined he would give up Google in additional methods than one when he discovered that the tech large had briefly helped the US military develop AI to study 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 could possibly be used to coach AI techniques, even when they weren’t particularly ones tied to the Pentagon mission. “I do not management any of the longer term outcomes that this can allow,” Mohandas thought. “So now, should not I be extra accountable?”
Mohandas, who taught himself programming and is predicated in Bengaluru, India, determined he needed to develop an alternate service for storing and sharing photographs that’s open source and end-to-end encrypted. One thing “extra non-public, 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. However Mohandas struggled to articulate to wider audiences why they need to rethink counting on Google Images, regardless of all of the conveniences it presents.
Then one weekend in Could, 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 finding out photos. Final month, Ente launched https://Theyseeyourphotos.com, an internet site and advertising and marketing stunt designed to show Google’s expertise towards itself. Individuals can add any picture to the web site, which is then despatched to a Google Cloud computer vision 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 many first photographs 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 sporting, a Casio F-91W. However then, Mohandas says, the AI did one thing unusual: It famous that Casio F-91W watches are commonly associated with 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 supply quick, goal outputs—nothing darkish.
The identical household picture uploaded to Theyseeyourphotos now returns a extra generic outcome that features the identify of the temple and the “partly cloudy sky and plush greenery” surrounding it. However the AI nonetheless makes a variety of assumptions about Mohandas and his household, like that their faces are expressing “joint contentment” and the “dad and mom are probably of South Asian descent, center class.” It judges their clothes (“applicable for sightseeing”) and notes that “the lady’s watch shows a time as roughly 2 pm, which corroborates with the picture metadata.”
Google spokesperson Colin Smith declined to remark straight on Ente’s mission. He directed WIRED to support pages that state uploads to Google Images are solely used to coach generative AI fashions that assist folks handle their picture libraries, like people who analyze the age and site of picture topics.The corporate says it doesn’t promote the content material saved in Google Images to 3rd events or use it for promoting functions. Customers can flip off a number of the evaluation options in Images, however they will’t stop Google from accessing their photos completely, as a result of the information usually are not end-to-end encrypted.
