AI Debugged

It started out innocently enough, I glanced at the tags in OneDrive as I was selecting a photo for a post recently. Normally I don’t pay much attention to them.

I have been using OneDrive since before it became OneDrive. Over time Microsoft kept changing, improving, this online storage and backup tool. Automatically assigned tags came about quite some time ago and improved over time. When downloading an image these tags are not written into the EXIF data, OneDrive keeps the file just the way it was when uploaded. I appreciate that, but it also means that the tags are ignored.

But something about them did not quite seem right for this photo. It shows a butterfly on a flower and the tags read Flower, Plant, Oxeye daisy, Outdoor, Ground, Petal Mayweed, Chamomile, Marguerite daisy, Camomile, Chamaemelum nobile, Daisy, White. Notice anything in that list? No, I’m not talking about the different flower names, I’m not an expert on that.

There is no mention of the butterfly. I checked another photo.

Here we get: Oxeye daisy, Flower, Pollen, Plant, Petal, Outdoor, Marguerite daisy, Chamomile, Mayweed, Camomile, Chamaemelum nobile, Asterales, Spanish daisy, Heath aster, African daisy, Daisy, Yellow. This time the color was yellow, no mention of white. No mention of the bumble bee either. Oh, pollen was in the list, I wonder how that can be.

I checked a bunch more photos that included bees and other insects. No mention of these creatures in the tag list. Not even this one:

The only thing in focus in this photo is the bug. Yet the tag list only shows Sky, Outdoor, Tree, Cloud, Cloudy.

So, with the greatest admiration for the clever folks at Microsoft, I have concluded that OneDrive has been thoroughly debugged. Debugged so cleanly that not a single bug even made it into the tag lists.

While I am maligning OneDive tags, let me show you one more “wonder”.

The tag list for this sylvan scene shows: Outdoor, Plant, Tree, Vegetation, Nature reserve, Jungle, Tropical and subtropical coniferous forests, Woodland, Old-growth forest, Rainforest, Natural environment, Forest, State park, Northern hardwood forest, Leaf, Terrestrial plant, Magellanic subpolar forests. So which is it, a Magellanic subpolar forest or a Northern hardwood forest, or a rainforest? It can’t be all of them. At least this tells us that the magic of artificial intelligence should be taken with a large block of salt, not just a grain.

Wag your rear end at them, little friend.

.:. © 2024 Ludwig Keck