The Google Arts and Culture app has a race problem
The Google Arts and Culture app (available on iOS and Android) has been around for two years, but this weekend, it shot to the top of both major app stores because of a small, quietly added update.
The newest feature lets you take a selfie, then searches a database of well-known artworks from around the world to match your photo with a face from a museum piece.
The software uses advanced artificial intelligence and facial recognition to analyze patterns in your face, then find similar traits across real photos and paintings. It's a fun experiment — especially if you get a good match.
But the app has been plagued by one major problem: It doesn't work very well for people of color and includes few artists from Latin America or places outside of Europe. So, if you're Mexican-American, like me, and you're looking to have some fun with the app... well, good luck!
Hispanics have been practically whitewashed from the system.
Take a look at my results:
In the five results that were retrieved for my selfie, three were European men, and the other two were Asian. I've tried the feature on different days, in different lighting, and while smiling and acting serious. I can't get the app to retrieve any photos of Latin American artists, no matter how hard I try. Nothing seems to work.
Sure, maybe I should have seen this coming. The art collecting world has historically been Eurocentric and fixated on the Western greats like Van Gogh, Picasso, Monet, Da Vinci, and Matisse. Although some collectors are branching out to Asia, they're still ignoring most of the Latin American world.
This is easiest to see when you look at Google's Arts & Culture list of places from which it has begun digitizing art. There are more than 700,000 items from the United States, more than 75,000 from the United Kingdom, and nearly 60,000 from Germany.
Compare that to the measly 16,000 artworks from Mexico (which, by the way, is home to one of the most populated and culturally vibrant cities in the world) or the measly 3,500 items from Peru, and you begin to get a sense of just how skewed the data is. In short, this seemingly fun app about art culture is actually quite biased and a little bit racist.
I wasn't the only person who noticed:
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Is this enough reason to call for the destruction of the app?
No, of course not.
The consequences of this shortcoming are fairly inconsequential, since it's still a relatively new project and Google is actively adding more artwork to the project.
But it is sure as hell disappointing. Technology is supposed to be the great equalizer; it's supposed to give greater access and provide a more wholistic worldview to everyone. When this type of project is so heavily focused on the U.S., Europe, and Asia, it sends the message that art from the rest of the world is not valued nearly as much. It also prevents people like me from sharing their stupid museum-selfie doppelgänger.
Topics Apps & Software Google Racial Justice
