We can get a computer to tag the birds, answer questions about them, and generate new pictures of them.
Well research teams have been working on it 10 years
they did good
edit: tbh honest i think it was around 5 years ago i started being able to identify things with google lens on my phone. they worked fast!
https://www.explainxkcd.com/wiki/index.php/1425:_Tasks
A month after this comic came out, Flickr responded with a prototype online tool to do something similar to what the comic describes, using its automated-tagging software. According to them, the bird solution “took us less than 5 years to build, though it’s definitely a hard problem, and we’ve still got room for improvement”.
(the site http://parkorbird.flickr.com is no longer online)
The original problem was posited… 60 years ago?
It’s a bit like saying “I wonder how the dinosaurs died?” in the early '00s, a few years before meteor theory really got nailed down. Like, ignore the last century of postulation. We just knocked this out real quick.
Like, ignore the last century of postulation. We just knocked this out real quick.
Oh wow thanks, TIL. I was a kid in the 90s, and always taught and read “there’s many guesses, but the most likely theory is a massive impact causing global changes”. And only today I learnt that it was a relatively new theory at the time, and the crater wasn’t even identified until the early 90s!
yeah, the comic describes it as “the virtually impossible” and directly notes we’ve spent 50 years trying. it’s just a really interesting perspective that it was a recent truism that this stuff is virtually impossible, and we’ve solved it and a huge number of other very difficult problems in less than a decade.
I’m not saying we aren’t building on centuries of work, i’m saying the rate of recent progress is remarkable. I feel like you missed the point on purpose in order to have a hot take.
yeah, the comic describes it as “the virtually impossible”
We are a lot better at it now than we were, say, ten years ago. But it is nearly trivial to outwit a “bird detecting algorithm” by holding up a vague facsimile of a bird. That gets us back to the old TrashFuture line about AI just being “some dude at a computer filling out captchas”.
I’m not saying we aren’t building on centuries of work, i’m saying the rate of recent progress is remarkable.
The recent progress is heavily overstated. More often than not, what a computer does today to recognize a bird is to pull on a large library of data labeled “birds” and ask if there’s a close-enough match. But that large library is not AI driven. Its the consequence of a bunch of manual labeling done by humans with eyes and brains. A novel or rare species of bird, or a bird that’s camouflaged, or even just a bird that’s out-of-focus or badly rendered, will still consistently fail the “Is this a bird?” test.
yeah and it has been 5 years since the comic and there was a research team that did it
It’s actually even more correct because it underestimated the time needed by 5 years
