Microsoft created a bot to auto-caption photos and it's going hilariously wrong
Mere weeks after Microsoft had to shut down its Tay chatbot for sending offensive tweets, the company might be in for another AI-related embarrassment - albeit probably not as serious.
This time, the culprit is Captionbot, an AI experiment that tries to recognize what's on a photo and come up with a text caption. Launched in late March, Captionbot actually does a pretty good job in many examples, but it's also horridly wrong in others, and when that happens, social media can be unforgiving.
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In one example, Captionbot mistakes the First Lady Michelle Obama for a cellphone. In another, it thinks the famous blue/black/white/gold dress is a cat wearing a tie (or a suitcase, see image above).
It's not just that Captionbot is sometimes wrong -- it'd be absurd to expect it to always be right in a world where even humans struggle to understand what's in a CAPTCHA image. But things get awkward when it's not only wrong, but weird. Check out some examples below.
As funny as Captionbot's failures are, we have to hand it to Microsoft for sometimes getting things amazingly accurate as well. Check out some of the things we tested, below.
Have you seen any particularly bad or good examples of Captionbot in action? Share them in the comments.
Topics Microsoft Social Media X/Twitter
Stan is a Senior Editor at Mashable, where he has worked since 2007. He's got more battery-powered gadgets and band t-shirts than you. He writes about the next groundbreaking thing. Typically, this is a phone, a coin, or a car. His ultimate goal is to know something about everything.
