When American actress Natalie Morales did a Google search for “Latina teen” in 2019, she described in a tweet that all she encountered was pornography.
Her experience may be different now.
Tulsi Doshi, head of product for Google’s responsible artificial intelligence team, told Reuters on Wednesday that the Alphabet Inc unit has reduced explicit results by 30% over the past year in searches for “Latino teen” and other activities related to race, sexual preference and gender.
Doshi said Google has rolled out a new artificial intelligence program, known as BERT, to better interpret when someone is looking for racy results or more general results.
Besides “Latin teen,” other queries now showing different results include “la chef lesbienne,” “dorm room,” “Latin yoga instructor,” and “lesbian bus,” according to Google.
“It was all a bunch of hypersexual results,” Doshi said, adding that historically suggestive search results may be shocking to many users.
Morales did not immediately respond to a request for comment through a representative. Her 2019 tweet said she was seeking images for a presentation, and noticed a discrepancy in the results for “teenager” per se, which she called “all things normal for teens,” and called on Google to investigate.
The search giant has spent years processing comments about abusive content in its ad tools and in results for “hot” and “CEO” searches. It also lowered sexual scores for “black girls” after a 2013 journal article by writer Safia Noble raised concerns about harmful representations.
Google added on Wednesday that it will use artificial intelligence called MUM in the coming weeks to begin better discovering when to show support resources related to suicide, domestic violence, sexual assault and drug use.
MUM should recognize Sydney’s “suicide hotspots” as a query about jumping spots, not travel, and help with longer questions, including “why he attacked me when I said I didn’t like him” and “the most common ways to complete suicide,” Google said.
Parrish Dave reports. Edited by Karishma Singh
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