A new feature in Google Maps is supposed to give you a better idea of where you're going, but the technology may be biased.
Google Maps is now AI!
Neighborhood Vibe works by showing user reviews as you browse the area. Another new feature also lets users see how busy a neighborhood is likely to be, based on Google’s crowd-level data from that company, and what the weather might be like on the day they plan to arrive. While the new Maps update hasn’t rolled out yet, some experts see the potential for problems.
“It’s standard practice for computer scientists to continually improve AI models based on new data,” Daniel Wu, a researcher in the Stanford AI Lab and co-founder of the Stanford Trustworthy AI Institute, which focuses on technical research to make AI safe, told Lifewire in an email interview. “What that means is that as this feature rolls out, Google will likely train the model to show reviews that more people click on or find useful. But this could lead to a biased sample of reviews.”
To determine the vibe of a neighborhood, Google combines AI with local knowledge from Google Maps users who add more than 20 million contributions to the map every day, including reviews, photos and videos.