Google’s A.I.-Powered Camera Was Destined to Fail
A program just can’t tell what’s ‘interesting’
Google just pulled the plug on its Clips camera, a tiny device that was supposed to capture photos of the little snippets of your day that would otherwise slip by.
Maybe it would snap a picture of your baby smiling as you went to pick them up, or your dog wagging its tail as you walked in the door. But when reviewers and consumers got their hands on the device, that fairy tale didn’t pan out.
“I wore the camera on the collar of my shirt while playing with my daughter hoping that it was capturing all her smiles at 7 weeks old. Logged into the app, nothing. I was crushed,” wrote one reviewer on Best Buy’s website.
Google promised to use A.I. to capture interesting moments in our lives, and that was the exact problem: There’s no one definition of interesting.
As a user, you had to spend a lot of time showing Google what you wanted it to take pictures of. Engadget’s Cherlynn Low wrote last year that she trained the Clips’ A.I. on her Google Photos history, ostensibly a diary of her visual preferences, and still couldn’t get it to reliably photograph her dog or friends.
We know what A.I. is good at doing: Making a decision with a clearly correct answer. If…
