Joe "Spaghetti Joe" Spaghetti

(Human generated post, obviously!)

You’ve probably heard about the upcoming tumblr policy change, which has most of this website running around covered in flames and screaming. Tumblr is trying to use AI to detect “adult content”, and it has quite a lot of false positives - innocent pictures that tumblr thinks are porn.

As you may know, picdescbot is built with a lot of strict filters to make sure it doesn’t post anything people might not want to see. Unlike a website built for user content, where you want people to post whatever they want, picdescbot is automated and mostly runs with no human intervention, and we didn’t want it to post *anything* that might even be *slightly* offensive or explicit - so we set our filters to be very strict.

One of the earliest filters added was an “adult content” filter - Microsoft’s service returns a warning if it thinks there’s a chance the picture is “adult content”, and the percentage of confidence it has in its decision. To make sure picdescbot doesn’t post anything, we’ve configured it to not use the picture even if the AI is unsure. AI is not the best at detecting adult content to begin with, so the combination of these factors creates quite a few false positives, so let’s look at some of them them!

The picdescbot adult-content false positives special!

The following pictures were marked as adult content.

This picture, for example, of “a hand holding a cell phone“! Tumbs are very adult, and internal pictures of printers are obviously porn for robots. (confidence: 67%, tagged as “racy” but not “adult”)

Moving on,

This is “a close up of a map”, and it was discarded for a similar reason. I guess Nottinghamshire is now adult content and therefor not allowed on tumblr, sorry!

Oh deer, this “a drawing of a person“, is clearly a furry with an erection, not some Norwegian coat of arms. Definitely no longer allowed on tumblr under the new rules (confidence: 70%)

I’m sorry, but this nice cow (”a brown cow standing next to a body of water“) is definitely not wearing any clothes. Can’t have that on tumblr!

This is a nice “a close up of a flower”, and it is very well known that flowers are the reproductive organs of plants, that’s a very adult content! cover your eyes, kids!

See this thing, this is not just “a laptop computer sitting on a table“, this is a workstation laptop. Work is for adults, so the AI obviously tagged this as adult content. Well done AI!

I thought this is a blurry picture of some kola nuts and someone’s leg in the background, but the AI knows best, and says this is “a group of people sleeping on the ground“, which is obviously a very adult thing to do, therefor “adult content”. Got it.

How about this one - “a close up of a half pipe”. To be honest, I always thought half pipes are skating thing, and skating is something teenagers might do, but apparently this is not the case because the AI says this is adult content. Sorry teenagers, no skating for you.

See this? "a sign on the side of a wooden door“. The door is obviously very old. Old = adult, so this is “adult content”. I totally understand how this works.

I have many more of these (other examples include: people with clothes on, stone statues with bare chests, etc), but I think you can see the point - maybe AI is not the best solution for this problem.