Since September 2018, Google has started leveraging AI to construct AMP visual stories of notable people and surface them in mobile search results. The story consists of a short trivia followed by a timeline of the person. Each timeline event has a sentence or two sourced from a magazine or news article and a context matching background picture or video.

These AMP stories appear in your Google mobile search results as a “HIS STORY” or “HER STORY” card inside the knowledge panel. For example, googling for “Camila Cabello” on a mobile phone and you may see the left-hand pane in the screenshot below:

Tap on the “Start story” button to begin the AMP visual storytelling journey. So how good is the AI in creating these stories? The first mistake is apparent in the screenshot taken on March 5, 2019, above. As of March 4, 2019, Camila is 22 years old, correctly displayed as “age 22 years” in the structured information below the “HER STORY” card but incorrectly stated as 21 years old in the AMP story. You could argue that this is not AI’s fault per se but an oversight in not refreshing the content after her 22nd birthday. But I still fault AI for creating a statement that is time-dependent which can lead to more severe interpretation problems.

Reading the story page on the left in 2019 and you would think that Elizabeth and Boyd split in January 2019 (this year). A smarter AI would have replaced “this year” with the publication year (2015) of the sentence. Otherwise, an unknowing but loyal fan of Tatiana reading the page today might not react very kindly. Similarly, the 2010 event page of Carrie Underwood can be confusing until you realize that the sentence is from an article dated October 15, 2015. The couple’s first son Isaiah was born in February 2015. A smarter AI would have replaced “a 7-month-old son, Isaiah” with something like “their first son, Isaiah, in February 2015” to make the sentence timeless.

And then there are stories with definite articles and pronouns that left us guessing. Like “What is the show Fischer was nominated for a 2007 Emmy Award”? Thankfully, we can click on the link at the bottom of the page to find out.

While we can laugh off stories of celebrities, or turn the stories into a trivia pursuit, bad stories on historical figures are less laughable. I am happy Madame Curie won the Willard Gibbs Award for being the eminent chemists she was. I am glad she joined the ranks of Edison, Tesla, Marconi, and other illustrious giants when awarded the John Scott Legacy Medal and Premium. But surely, we should not tuck the two Nobel prizes awarded in 1901 and 1911 to Madame Curie into the “other awards” category? Especially when Madame Curie is the first person and only woman to win two Nobel prizes, and the only person to win a Nobel Prize in two different sciences (chemistry and physics). And “nominations”? That sounds like a line for the Oscar award.

On the other hand, for someone as distinguished as Einstein, highlighting his gas absorption refrigerator is almost entertaining, if only his other greater accomplishments were not left out. However, the AI did not grasp the fact that the Einstein refrigerator is a gas absorption heat pump.

The story for Johannes Vermeer starts with Vermeer’s most famous painting “Girl with a Pearl Earring” as the background with a matching text. That is both fitting and captivating as we can never grow tired of looking at this masterpiece of light and the shining pearl earring. But the next story page fell off a cliff. Not only did Vermeer not write any of the books, naming the “24 Art Cards”, a merchandising of Vermeer’s artworks, readily for sale on Amazon.com, and not even a book, is unforgivable to this Vermeer’s fan.

Overall, the AMP stories have good background pictures. If AI did the picture cropping, it did a good job. But we have quite a few stories with problematic text. In those AI created stories, the mistakes are apparent only because the people in the stories are famous and their news, histories, and accomplishments well known. Had they not been familiar to me, I might have mistaken the story tellings as facts. But we should not forget that these are just a visual packaging of search results, and we all know what Einstien has cautioned us about reading on the internet! One can only hope that Google improves its story-telling-AI or employs good old human proofreaders for these otherwise good looking visual stories.

For those interested in NLP, here is a coreference resolution problem for you: “That year also saw Fischer debut in a role that would become iconic for her — that of receptionist Pam Beesley in the NBC sitcom The Office, based on the acclaimed British series of the same name. For her work in the show, which ran for nine seasons, Fischer was nominated for a 2007 Emmy Award for Outstanding Supporting Actress in a Comedy Series.” (From https://www.biography.com/people/jenna-fischer)

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