Google yourself. We’ve all done it at some point in our lives. The results you usually get back — unless you’re famous — are a few of your social media pages and the realisation that your name isn’t as unique as you first thought. Unless Google mistakenly thinks you’re a serial killer, then you also get a surprise.
That’s just what happened to Hristo Georgiev, a software developer in Switzerland. He found that search results of his name included a photo of him linked to the Wikipedia page of a serial killer with the same name.
Seems like Google falsely associated a photo of mine with a Wikipedia article of a serial killer. I don't know if this is hilarious or terrifying. pic.twitter.com/rmAL7uQYy4
— Hristo Georgiev (@hggeorgievcom) June 24, 2021
Google needs to get a grip
In a post on his blog, Georgiev said “My first reaction was that somebody was trying to pull off some sort of an elaborate prank on me, but after opening the Wikipedia article itself, it turned out that there’s no photo of me there whatsoever.”
Georgiev seems to think it has something to do with Google’s “knowledge graph algorithm” which (we think) is in charge of populating those infoboxes on the right side of your screen when you google something. In this case, it got it wrong.
This wouldn’t be the first time Google’s AI has made an oopsie. Remember when it pointed racist search terms to the White House when Obama was in office? Yeah, we try not to think about that either.
As we move steadily toward a future powered by AI, robots become more common and a few giant companies control almost every aspect of our lives, the possibility of one of those companies turning into Skynet from the Terminator movies starts to seem less crazy than it did in 1984. Except when the AI in question makes mistakes like this. Unless…that’s all part of its plan.
Source: The Next Web