Is Google's Arts And Culture App Racist?
WE NEED A BIGGER PALETTE
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If you've been on Instagram or Twitter in the last week, you've probably seen friends using the Google Arts and Culture app. The app, which was released in 2016 but recently became popular, compares a user's face to portraits in museums from around the world. But while Google seems to be able to pull eerily accurate matches from the 70,000 artworks belonging to its partner institutions for white people, the results have been markedly limited and sometimes outright offensive for people of color, and in particular Asian people.

By searching the #GoogleArtsAndCulture hashtag, it's clear that the portrait selection for individuals with Asian features is not large, frequently producing top comparisons to a small set of Asian faces, that include Geishas and men with Fu-Manchu-style facial hair, with little resemblance to the user.

 

 

For Asian-Americans (the app is limited to the US for now), the results not only make us feel forgotten, having fewer possible portrait outcomes, but they also perpetuate harmful stereotypes that we face on a routine basis. 

For Asian women, who seem particularly vulnerable to the lack of choice, the comparison to literal geishas threatens to reify the racist image of the Submissive Asian Women that has existed since before Madame Butterfly. According to the stereotype, all Asian women are shy, obedient, and exotic sex objects whose top priority is to serve men.

 

Accurate @googleartsculture @freersackler #kuchibeni #gion #seitoku #selfiesunday

A post shared by Matthew Park (@kasinblack) on

 

But while the app is Google's, the problem is a wider symptom of racism in the art and tech world.

Once again, Google is running into problems with how its technology interacts with people of color. Google's facial recognition and comparison software seem to be relying on stereotypical Asian features over more refined ones in making its comparisons — resulting in matches that seem blunt and tone-deaf in comparison with their white counterparts. This previously became an issue for Google in 2015 when its facial recognition software was found to be categorizing black people as "gorillas" in Google Photos.

Joy Buolamwini, a Researcher at MIT Media Lab and founder of the Algorithmic Justice League, believes that such issues are created when teams of mostly white engineers create facial recognition algorithms based on their own recognition of facial features, which may contain racial biases from their upbringing and experiences. Despite the ability for these algorithms to learn through usage, a primarily white training library and user base will not help to improve the algorithms recognition of people of color.

The lack of a significant collection of Asian faces in the app can be attributed to Google's selection of its partner institutions and those institutions themselves. Hundreds more organizations and museums are partnered with Google in Europe and the US than in all of Asia, as can be seen on the map below, a disparity that likely plays a part in the app's lack of diversity: 

A map of museums collaborating with Google. Google Arts and Culture

Another source of the problem is the historical representation of Asians in museums in America. Aside from issues of Orientalist representation, Asian people have had a fraught relationship with the US, and while contemporary Asian artists such as Ai Wei Wei have recently found massive success in Europe and the US, Asian people are still underrepresented in museums across the western hemisphere.

 

LMAO #googleartsandculture

A post shared by Katie Seaton (@hameneggenchz) on

 

While the inclusion of geishas or Fu Man Chus in Google's collection isn't necessarily a bad thing by itself, it becomes one when those stereotypes are nearly the exclusive representation of Asian people in the app. Asian faces are as diverse as white ones, and they deserve their day on Google Arts and Culture.

Digg has reached out to Google for comment and has yet to hear back. 

<p>Benjamin Goggin is the News Editor at Digg.&nbsp;</p>

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