According to Cheezburger’s Fail Blog, there’s a new extension for the Chrome browser that replaces pictures of Donald Trump with pictures of kittens. Here’s an example:
You can supposedly download the extension here, and 8 people have given it four stars. The rationale?:
Now I’m a bit wary of this. How does it identify pictures of Trump? What if it sometimes worked in reverse, replacing photos of kittens with photos of Trump? That would devastate me. But if anybody wants to try it, and report back, I’d be delighted. After all, my modus operandus for Facebook friends who posted endlessly about Trump was to add a cute kitten to the comments section.
I can understand not wanting to see Trump, but I am not sure that associating Trump with kitties is a good idea. It may make him more palatable, or make cats more distasteful.
I don’t know… Given Trump’s history kittens seem particularly appropriate.
The problem with that extension is when I scan the pictures on google news I’ll be afraid to click on cute cat stories out of fear it will be a Trump story.
It doesn’t work for me on Google News. In fact it doesn’t seem work for me at all. I’m beginning to suspect that it only works on Facebook, and i don’t use Facebook.
Yeah it didn’t work for me on google news, and I don’t use facebook either.
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Those kittehs deserve better. We, as a nation, can do better.
They’d better not replace Da Donald with that cute orange tabby Jerry Coyne. The indignity!!
It’d be the right colour, though, wouldn’t it?
cr
MUCH more attractive on JC da kitteh. People don’t come in that color😖
Cats are little killers that decimate birds, small animals and my clothes.
Don’t give them a bad name by associating them with Herr Trumpenfurher
Oh, yes. It works. Not on every website, but it works. Made me very happy. Kittens are so much nicer to look at than Trump.
Remain wary, Jerry. I’ve heard it sometimes mistakenly substitutes kitty pics for Oompa Loompas and Cheetos® ads, too.
Like when that Jewish paper replaced pictures with women in them with pictures without women in them.
I belong to the school that says you must look the devil in his eyes.
It appears to do more than that. You can add other search terms to be replaced by cats or just blocked, but they must be “coma” separated (sic).
I’ve got the ‘Drumpf’ Chrome extension and, dammit, it works! Every single mention on this page (other than in the images) shows as ‘Drumpf’. Including the heading of this page – “New Chrome extension replaces pictures of Donald Drumpf with kittens”
The potential problem with the image replacement is, presumably, that it identifies images by adjacent text (which is what I think Google Images does). So it may have a fairly high error rate.
cr
That’s a considerably easier problem – simply find-and-replace style, more or less.
Image parsing by our computers is much harder. That’s why CAPTCHA and its like exist, after all. “Click on all the politicians that use a hair piece” might be a vaguely amusing one (though requires too much domain knowledge for many humans, alas).
Well, as I suggested, I don’t think Google Image Search works on any sort of image recognition, I suspect it works on the proximity of words closely associated with images (using their usual search algorithm).
So if one could put up a pic of an aardvark prominently labelled ‘Donald Trump’ (and get enough other sites to link to it) then Google Images would faithfully return that picture when anyone does an image search for the Donald.
That’s a different problem of course from the one tackled by the subject of this post.
cr
infiniteimprobability, Google Image searches actually do search the image by looking for adjacent text, as you suspect, but also for matching text in the metadata for the image. The Chrome extension probably does the same thing. A reverse Google Image search, however, searches an image you have and tries to find matching images.
https://support.google.com/websearch/answer/1325808?hl=en
Ah, thanks for that clarification.
cr
When modus operandi as operandus is in the genitive.
It probably works by looking for the alt text for an image, the text that is supposed to show up if the image doesn’t for some reason. But if whoever entered the story didn’t enter the alt text, then it won’t work.
Alt text is part of the metadata.
It doesn’t work. The jackolantern on my web site got replaced by a kitten.
It works on bbc.com, Hufpo, and economist.com, but not on NYT, Wapo, The Atlantic, The Guardian. Not sure with other sites, I have not checked.
Oops sorry, not Hufpo but cnn.com.
It does not work on Hufpo.
Strange, now it works on NYT. It seems to work sporadically.
Okay last post as an update.
It works on LA Times, Forbes, Reuters, CBS News, Politico, The Daily Beast, Time.com, Fox News, economist.com, bbc.com, WSJ, Business Insider, NYT, cnn.com, Salon, Chicago Tribune, The Hill, but not on The Atlantic, Huffpo, Wapo, Fortune, The Independent, Bloomberg, USA Today, Aljazeera, and The Guardian. Not sure about others.
I don’t think the extension works by searching for the content of the ALT, since I looked all over for Trump images in the whole Wapo and none was replaced by a kitty image and it is rather unthinkable that Wapo does not have at least one with the Alt not left blank or omitted altogether. My guess is that the extension is not compatible with some aspects of those sites, resulting in a failure to infiltrate and manipulate their images.