Recently, while attending the PhotoPlus Photography event in NYC I visited the Canon booth who had a section to sign users up for their “new”  RAISE Photo Community. https://raise.usa.canon.com/  This is a service Canon launched to compete with some of the other photography communities like Flickr and 500Pix. They claim it uses Artificial Intelligence to help engage, teach and improve your photography. This is a quote from the site’s Privacy Statement.

  “RAISE is a photo community (the “Platform”) from Canon U.S.A., Inc. (“Canon,” “we,” “us” or “our”) that uses artificial intelligence (AI) to help you find new ways to categorize and organize your photographs, collaborate with other Platform users, and be inspired. The artificial intelligence engine learns elements of photography by analyzing every image uploaded, including categories, style, and composition of the image, and information about the subject of the image, including any individuals/objects depicted, and any objects identified (“Content”).”

  My first clue should have been everyone standing in line to sign up via a set of web connected PCs, were getting server errors when trying to submit their information.  The poor girl who was working the booth was trying to cover the best she could by simply having everyone enter their names and email addresses into an excel spreadsheet.  This was an event at the Javits Center in Manhattan, with thousands of people in attendance and the site wasn’t even functional enough for signup at a large event.  I also later learned this is not even a new site, it has been live (if you can call it that) for the better part of a year and had forgotten that I had actually previously signed up for it.  Despite that, While I’m a Fan of Canon Cameras, RAISE is pretty much a failure in my opinion.

First, It’s not very user intuitive.  The User Level / Badge process doesn’t seem to have any identifiable pattern, lacking any real explanation as to how it works in the in the FAQ or Community Guidelines. The Support link which seems like it was intended to bring up a live support chat, never does more than prompt “Sorry, we can’t chat right now. Please send an email using the form below.” And Emails sent via that form have not received any replies or even an acknowledgement of being received.  As for function, users are assigned levels based on their activity and are supposed to increase their levels by earning various badges in two top level categories “BUILD YOUR NETWORK” and “IMPROVE YOUR SKILLS”, however there doesn’t seem to be a 1:1 correlation of described badges to activity by the user. For example: The “Upload images ” badge states “Next badge at 5 uploads”. That would imply, if I upload 5 images, I earn the badge.  However after uploading over 20 images, I currently show a status of “3/5” when viewing my “Progress”. I can’t tell what 3 or why the others are not being counted.  Other badges are behave the same way. I show “22/25” for “Get reactions” with over 50 likes combined across all of my images. And every badge seems to behave the same way.

Other functions on the site also seem to be off. Challenges for example: when voting is open in a challenge, you only see a handful of images to vote on. So is my submitted  image in a challenge with only 10 other images or am I only seeing a limited set of thousands of challenge submissions by other users.  Nowhere on the site is there an explanation as to how the images are selected for you to vote on.  And when joining a challenge, even the inspiration images shown to inspire you, often doesn’t align with the stated subject and composition of the stated theme. For example, today I was looking at a “Portrait” challenge with the SUBJECT: dog | COMPOSITION: balance elements in the scene. All of the “inspiration”  images were of a beautiful blonde hair woman in a winter background. Not a dog in sight, so either the the AI is judgemental and she should be offended or all of the images are mis-tagged by the user who uploaded them. Automatically grouping images by hashtags is not what I would consider “A.I” There is no intelligence there.  That is just returning results based on a database table query.

Hey Canon, thanks for the free hat but I’m sorry, RAISE seems to be a day late and seriously underdeveloped!