Waste time at work by teaching an AI how to recognise targets. Sorry, I mean things.
Launched in 2017 out of Google’s Creative Lab, Quick, Draw! is a browser-based game kind of like Pictionary, except instead of your drunk uncle Wikus, it’s a neural network AI trying to guess what exactly your garbage doodle is supposed to be. Is it a house? Is it a microwave? Is it a post-objectivist deconstruction of subtext as a paradoxical reality, but ironically? Nah, it’s a flamingo.
The Google AI Blog also published an article about it, including composites of the same object as visualised by users in different countries and cultures. Turns out, cats look more or less the same from most datasets. Chairs don’t.
These composite drawings, we realized, could reveal how perspectives and preferences differ between audiences from different regions, from the type of bread used in sandwiches to the shape of a coffee cup, to the aesthetic of how to depict objects so they are visually appealing. For example, a more straightforward, head-on view was more consistent in some nations; side angles in others.
So that’s a fun fact for your next Tinder date.