Designers built an AI penis detector to protest Google’s prudish doodles

Cast your mind back to 2016 and you might recall Quick, Draw! — an AI experiment from Google that guessed what users were doodling. It was basically AI Pictionary, with Google later releasing the millions of sketches it collected as an open-source dataset.

But there was one doodle that Google’s AI never recognized and that never appeared in its data: the humble penis.

It sounds childish, but it’s sort of a big omission. The penis is perhaps the most significant and durable doodle of all time. It’s a sigil that’s been scrawled on surfaces for thousands of years — everywhere from Roman walls to medieval manuscripts — and variously signifies good luck, virility, or just “I’m a man and I was here.”

To rectify Google’s mistake, the Mozilla foundation commissioned Dutch design studio Moniker to build an AI penis doodle detector. It’s a bit of silly fun, but Moniker and Mozilla say they’re also making a serious point: in an age where US tech giants control so…