Back in 2016, Google launched an AI experiment called Quick, Draw! that guessed what users were doodling in real-time. The game listed an item to draw and you’d doodle it as the neural network would digitally shout answers to try and correctly guess if you were drawing a cookie, a soccer ball, or just a fucked-up smiley face. A single line would cause the AI to annoyingly guess that you were drawing a line, or a see-saw, and it would continue to guess until the 20-second clock ran out.
Drawing a dick, though? The AI has no words for dicks. (Or, in our case, the AI thought the doodled dick was a pair of binoculars or, weirdly, flip flops.) Google omitted crude objects from its category pool, so vaginas, penises, anuses, boobs, and you get it couldn’t be guessed by the AI. Later, Google released data showing off the millions of doodles it collected from each category and how each unique doodle was made by its users. Predictably, dicks were not present in the data set.
Naturally, this angered some. Where, they asked, are the dicks? Like Amsterdam-based interactive design studio Moniker, who took note of Google’s position of censorship and combated their anti-dick rhetoric with DoNotDrawAPenis.com, a parody of Quick, Draw! in which you’re told to not draw a dick, and if you do, the website’s AI erases it. The project grabs dicks from “people who are not willing to stay within the moral guidelines set by our social network providers.”
What’s better than one penis to fight against Google censorship? 10,000 penises (!), which Moniker has collected and released as a dataset download over at their Github. If you can’t read data sets though, and you just want to “support the cause,” Moniker has put out a dick towel dick tea towel which features over 5,000 dick doodles that the project has collected from all over the globe.