The other day I got an email from 500px telling me that some of the pictures I had listed with them for licensing could not be accepted because I didn’t have model releases for them. On contacting 500px I got the following reply:

 “We recently ran an algorithm to detect images that had people in them with no release attached, this was our attempt to speed up the ingestion process since we are working through a bit of a backlog at the moment. It has certainly been effective in identifying unreleased photos, but it sometimes tags photos that don’t have people in them so we still have some tweaking to do :)”

Heather
500px Prime

Now I can sort of understand how the shot at the top got selected by the computer as the sculpture does have some anthropomorphic features. But this next one sort of defies any sort of reasoning.

Here the program picked the face of Chairman Mao on the wall of the Tiananmen gate tower to the Forbidden City north of Tiananmen Square. I don’t think I’d have much chance of getting a model release from Mao Zedong  seeing as he’s been dead for 39 years! I also think it’s a bit late to get a release from the subject of this next photo.

The annoying thing was that were 134 photos with this error so it doesn’t inspire a lot of faith in 500px to actually do a good job of selling the work because when you buy stock you enter what you want into a search engine and their computer has just demonstrated that it has no clue as to the subject content despite captioning and tagging.