Microsoft’s CaptionBot photo caption tool is hilariously bad

Microsoft’s artificial intelligence technology continues to be a bit of an embarrassment.

Just weeks after shutting down its Tay chatbots for sending racist tweets, the company released new photo analyzing software dubbed CaptionBot – but it’s not very accurate.

CaptionBot uses artificial intelligence to attempt to recognize what’s in a photo and then caption the photo based on what the software sees.

READ MORE: Microsoft’s racist AI chat bot returns only for brief pot-smoking Twitter meltdown

The tool uses a combination of computer vision software, emotion detecting software and information from Microsoft’s Bing image search to try to identify things within images that users upload to test it.

In some cases, CaptionBot is very accurate – but, more often than not, it seems to come up with some puzzling and hilarious results.

Global News put CaptionBot to the test and got some pretty interesting results:

This isn’t the first time one of Microsoft’s AI experiments went poorly.

Last month, the company had to shut down its now infamous artificial intelligence (AI) chat bot “Tay” after Twitter users managed to teach it to tweet expletive-laden racist remarks and boast about smoking pot.

In fact, CaptionBot comes from the same technology that was used to create Microsoft’s age-guessing app How-Old.net, which became an Internet craze in May 2015.

READ MORE: How old do you really look? Microsoft’s age-guessing app will either delight or outrage you

The tool allowed users to upload a photo of themselves then have it guess their gender and age. Of course, it managed to outrage people after tacking on an extra 10 to 15 years to their age.

(Note: I uploaded my Global News headshot at the time and it predicted I was nearly 10 years older. I have since had new headshots taken.)

It’s important to remember these tools are works in progress for the company. Tay, CaptionBot and How-Old.net are all part of Microsoft’s research into artificial intelligence and designed to learn over time.

For now, they provide great entertainment.