Update: There Is No William Hung Bias

So some of the AOL Labs folks let me know that I was all wet about my assertion that their Celebrity Look-Alike product had a William Hung bias.

I'd come to this determination because of a presentation at last week's AOL Developers Conference, which featured a few screenshots where William Hung was shown as a match for CTO Balan Nair and Senior VP Barry Appelman.

The images were doctored. It was a joke, and I missed it.

The Celebrity Look-Alike product folks have a Journal, where you can get product updates. Read their blog entry for more details, including screenshots of the actual results for Balan and Barry.

They also talk about the photos they're drawing from:

"...we currently have about 500 celebrities, about equally split among the genders. Because of previous legal issues with using celebrity photos, we were limited to using only this small number of images, and as such, unfortunately, we have very few celebrities who are not Caucasians or African-Americans in our database (we actually only have 2 Asian males in our database, including William Hung, and only 1 Indian Asian male). Fortunately, due to recent legal rulings, we will now be able to use thousands of celebrities (including many more for the different ethnicities)."

So, the Labs folks are going to be adding another thousand celeb photos within the next few weeks.

They've also added a Send to a Friend function on the results pages, to make it easy for you to send your results to folks.

Thanks to the Labs folks for the correction. I'll try to talk more about different AOL Labs projects as I learn more about what they're doing.

Thanks -- Joe

Tags: aol labs, celebrity look-alikes, william hung bias, aol developers conference