So, over the last few years I have been backing up the photos taken on my phone to the cloud. Google started doing it automatically with Picassa and then with Google + and now with Google Photos. I would see it happening and turn it off in the past but a spate of broken or lost or stolen devices made me realise how valuable this service is. So when I found a repository of pictures that I copied from my device to free up space, I decided to add then to Google Photos.
Google’s artificial intelligence program looks at the photos, identifies people, places and things and then makes animated gifs, enhanced photos or slide show movies from them. It is actually a pretty cool when it created something totally unexpected.
This animated gif was created from all the attempts to get a good picture. It’s rather comical to look at and puts a smile on my face as I remember that day. Point Google Photos. Sometimes it creates something so totally random and bizarre that it’s hilarious and that’s even even better then the good stuff it makes.
So when I saw this video in the Google Photos Creations section, I couldn’t help but laugh because I couldn’t figure out how it choose those photographs. So, I decided to share it with Facebook using my Android device. All seemed fine until I got an email from Facebook about the video being a copyright infringement.
So, imagine my surprise to this because all of the pictures and I would assume Google used open media or such for the music. So, I clicked the link to see the details.
I clicked the link to restore the video and provided all of the detailed information like my full name, physical address, email address and telephone number. They also made me “sign” it digital affidavit style by typing my name.
Success. I just have to wonder if there is meta-data that lets Facebook know that the Google Photo AI created it and this was just a way to thwart the competition. I dunno why it triggered the violation but conspiracy aside, online companies are guilty of this kind of behavior. Microsoft intentionally.displayed a scary, vague message when you installed Windows 3.11 on top of Digital Research’s competing Disk Operating System or DOS to keep people loyal to the Microsoft brand.
Random Babble 