Bombay cat and noodles: AI says the darnedest things

Artificial intel­li­gence is both thrilling and ter­ri­fy­ing, but rarely does it make me laugh. One recent morn­ing it did, how­ev­er, when the Visual Look-Up fea­ture in my Apple Photos Library iden­ti­fied the image below as a Bombay cat, a breed known for being sleek black and mus­cu­lar, with  gold­en eyes.

Why I found this misiden­ti­fi­ca­tion so amus­ing is unclear, but it’s no doubt relat­ed to my desire to be smarter than my computer—which, as a rule, I am not. It felt good to take off the dunce cap (that chaf­ing elas­tic chin strap!) and swap out my usu­al morn­ing news-dive for a chuck­le. Mirth has been in such short sup­ply late­ly here on Manor Drive.

If you’re in a sim­i­lar mood, check out these oth­er pho­to ID bloop­ers I uncov­ered, with AI’s incor­rect descrip­tion below each image.

American Tree Frog

Poppy

Noodles

Anna’s Hummingbird

Since today’s goal is lev­i­ty, I’ll leave you to pon­der what these misiden­ti­fi­ca­tions might indi­cate about AI (as well as my pho­to­graph­ic abil­i­ties and how I spend my time). I will tell you that I cur­rent­ly have 9,803 images in my pho­to library. While I didn’t check them all (that would be com­plete­ly idi­ot­ic and a colos­sal waste of time, right?), the major­i­ty that I did check were cor­rect­ly identified—so the take­away here seems pret­ty obvi­ous: I’ve got to get a more com­fort­able chin strap for my dunce cap.

In case you’re curi­ous, here’s what each of the pho­tos real­ly depicts:

American Tree Frog = Water droplet on a hos­ta leaf

Poppy = Ray and disc flo­rets at the cen­ter of a sunflower

Noodles = Extreme close­up of a peony flower’s repro­duc­tive structures

Anna’s Hummingbird = Seed pods on a Kentucky Coffee Tree

Blackfin Barracuda = Milkweed pod dis­pers­ing seeds at the Winchester Traveling Trail

And final­ly, Bombay Cat is a por­trait of Grandma Brandt’s white iris — obviously:)