AOL’s AI Image Captions Terribly Describe Attempted Murder.

During the last week of March, news broke of an attempted murder that occurred on O'ahu, one of Hawaii's most populated islands. A man attempted to kill his wife by pushing her off the edge of a well-known hiking trail following her refusal to take a photo together. The woman suffered serious injuries but is currently stable. The man, a 46-year-old doctor, was arrested within hours of the attack.

AOL.com, an Internet portal owned by Yahoo!, reported the news the day after the incident, providing images depicting the people involved in the incident. The captions, as well as the alt text (short written description that is provided as an attribute in HTML images), however, carried contextually alien explanations.

“Couple smiling on a beach at sunset, associated with Hawaii doctor incident,” and "smiling woman outdoors, linked to high-level doctor and Hawaii incident" are just two of several reported captions that are cold and completely out of place. The generative nature of these descriptions underscores how crucial human supervision is in even the seemingly simplest tasks.