Google Photos' Assistant AI automatically created a bizarre panorama from three skiing photos, resulting in a distorted image showing a friend's giant head lurking behind trees while another friend disappeared completely.
Google Photos' Assistant AI, part of the Android photo app, was designed to help organize photos by creating albums based on geolocation data and facial recognition, and generating animations from sequential photos. Alex Harker took three pictures while skiing in Banff, Alberta - one with friends and two without them. The Google Photos Assistant automatically detected that these three frames belonged together and created an unexpected panorama by splicing the photos together. The resulting image showed Harker's friend Matt as a giant head hiding behind trees while his other friend vanished completely. Harker shared the glitchy panorama on Reddit where it received over 188,000 upvotes on the r/funny subreddit. The incident demonstrates how AI photo organizing software can produce unexpected and nonsensical results when attempting to automatically process and combine images. While observers noted the algorithm did technically perform well at masking trees and following contours, the overall result was bizarre and unintended.
Domain classification, causal taxonomy, severity scores, and national security assessments were LLM-classified and may contain errors.
AI systems that fail to perform reliably or effectively under varying conditions, exposing them to errors and failures that can have significant consequences, especially in critical applications or areas that require moral reasoning.
AI system
Due to a decision or action made by an AI system
Unintentional
Due to an unexpected outcome from pursuing a goal
Post-deployment
Occurring after the AI model has been trained and deployed