this is a bad argument, it could be applied equally to all communication technology
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AI is fundamentally ‘a surveillance technology’
21–30 of 201 posts
Re: AI is fundamentally ‘a surveillance technology’
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Re: AI is fundamentally ‘a surveillance technology’
#23Ironic opening line from a website whose full screen banner is desperately trying to convince me that the tracking cookies they don't strictly need are of any benefit to me. > Why is it that so many companies that rely on monetizing the data of their users seem to be extremely hot on AI?
The article is just relaying what someone said and not their own opinion, I guess, so they can get away with that
Re: AI is fundamentally ‘a surveillance technology’
#24[deleted]
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Re: AI is fundamentally ‘a surveillance technology’
#25This is a bit too much of a stretch. It's like saying that newspapers are fundamentally a gossip technology.
Are you returning that judgement as a function of the submission title (which apparently rewrites between «gossip» and attention calling an original note, «AI is a way, I think, to entrench and expand the surveillance business model»), of Coldewey's summary of the interview, of the interview itself ( https://youtu.be/amNriUZNP8w ), of the paper that is the occasion for the interview
(it must be Open (For Business): Big Tech, Concentrated Power, and the Political Economy of Open AI - https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=4543807 )...?
Whittaker's point is about a certain cone of issues. Her position was previously exposed at least at https://slate.com/technology/2023/05/meredith-whittaker-inte...
Re: AI is fundamentally ‘a surveillance technology’
#26this is a bad argument, it could be applied equally to all communication technology
It does. All communication technology is surveillance technology.
I'm just reading a rather well written PhD thesis that disputes this [0]
Certainly, any badly designed communication system is incidentally a surveillance device. And there are many examples stretching back to the 1940s.
However, a properly designed communication system is inherently a counter-surveillance system. It just took us 80 years to figure out that important functional requirement.
[1] https://research.tue.nl/files/197416841/20220325_Appelbaum_h...
Re: AI is fundamentally ‘a surveillance technology’
#27Does anybody know of a facial recognition AI that actually classifies faces as (non)-liars as she claims? Not sure about this take. You need data at the end of the day, to build good AI models. These days it feels like anyone's public takes are more or less just a means to promote their own cause. And I say this as a happy and long-time Signal user.
Well, the full quote from Whittaker is:
> “You know, you walk past a facial recognition camera that’s instrumented with pseudo-scientific emotion recognition, and it produces data about you, right or wrong, that says ‘you are happy, you are sad, you have a bad character, you’re a liar, whatever.’
While I'm not aware of any technology that claims to classify faces as liars the rest of the statement is broadly true. And if you wanted to cross-check a face against a database of known liars, the entire statement is true.
According to https://www.cyberlink.com/faceme/insights/articles/363/smart... "It can be difficult to discern how consumers feel about a retail experience, or about the products they are buying or avoiding. Facial recognition can help with this by assessing and charting emotions: happy, sad, angry, surprised, indifferent, etc."
It also says "By cross-checking everyone who enters the store against a database of identified shoplifters and unruly customers, facial recognition can detect and deter repeat offenders" and "Using facial recognition, retailers can know precisely when an employee arrives, takes breaks, and leaves for the day"
Personally a lot of this technology seems pretty doubtful to me - don't shoplifters wear hats to keep their faces off CCTV? And every 'emotion recognition' system demo I've seen has used faces with emotions so ridiculously exaggerated they look like they belong in a youtube thumbnail.
Re: AI is fundamentally ‘a surveillance technology’
#28The current wave of AI seems more like an investment scam to me. Like crypto currencies and NFTs were.
Re: AI is fundamentally ‘a surveillance technology’
#29Does anybody know of a facial recognition AI that actually classifies faces as (non)-liars as she claims? Not sure about this take. You need data at the end of the day, to build good AI models. These days it feels like anyone's public takes are more or less just a means to promote their own cause. And I say this as a happy and long-time Signal user.
Well, the full quote from Whittaker is: > “You know, you walk past a facial recognition camera that’s instrumented with pseudo-scientific emotion recognition, and it produces data about you, right or wrong, that says ‘you are happy, you are sad, you have a bad character, you’re a liar, whatever.’ While I'm not aware of any technology that claims to classify faces as liars the rest of the statement is broadly true. An…
> It also says "By cross-checking everyone who enters the store against a database of identified shoplifters and unruly customers, facial recognition can detect and deter repeat offenders" and "Using facial recognition, retailers can know precisely when an employee arrives, takes breaks, and leaves for the day"
Ofc you "can" - in principle.
Is any of this currently being done, however?
Re: AI is fundamentally ‘a surveillance technology’
#30The submitted summary of the video-recorded interview at TechCrunch Disrupt are occasioned by the article
Open (For Business): Big Tech, Concentrated Power, and the Political Economy of Open AI - https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=4543807
I suggest to read (at least) the abstract (too long to be copied here) to get some more proper idea of the debated area.