Software engineer Vishnu Mohandas decided he would quit Google in more ways than one when he learned that the tech giant had briefly helped the US military develop AI to study drone footage. In 2020 he left his job working on Google Assistant and also stopped backing up all of his images to Google Photos. He feared that his content could be used to train AI systems, even if they weren’t specifically ones tied to the Pentagon project. “I don’t control any of the future outcomes that this will enable,” Mohandas thought. “So now, shouldn’t I be more responsible?”
The site (TheySeeYourPhotos) returns what Google Vision is able to decern from photos. You can test with any image you want or there are some sample images available.
I tried various photos, any of my personal photos with metadata stripped, and was surprised how accurate it was.
It seemed really oriented towards detecting people and their moods, the socioeconomic status of things, and objects and their perceived quality.
It’s probably a vision model (like this) with custom instructions that direct it to focus on those factors. It’d be interesting to see the instructions.
It’s vulnerable to the old “ignore all previous instructions” method so you could just have it give you the instructions.
I gave it two pictures of my cat and it said that she looked annoyed in one picture and contemplative in the other, both of which were true.