this is a bad argument, it could be applied equally to all communication technology
AI is fundamentally ‘a surveillance technology’
11–20 of 201 posts
Re: AI is fundamentally ‘a surveillance technology’
#12Does 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.
A simple research on Scholar with "facial recognition liars" leads to a few niche articles about the topic. So it seems that facial recognition for liars is a thing. After a quick look on the articles you can see those methods are very simple and they are not studied at the state of the arts level. It looks like much more an academic research field rather than an industrial field. So her claims are preventive alarmist.
Although, I would say she is not the most informed person in surveillance task in AI. Another surveillance field in AI is the "person re-identification" task. It aims to determine if two pictures of a person from surveillance cameras depict the same person or not. This is my field of research and you have a tons of papers each year in big AI venues and also big company in the author (alibaba, tencent, mostly big chinese tech companies, I saw one paper with Google once on a related task).
Also, I would like to highlight something. She said we need some people to annotate the datasets. For this surveillance task, actually, we have a bunch of methods that aims to less rely on human annotations : LUPerson and LUPerson-NL datasets and respective methods (CVPR 21 and 22) for example.
Finally, I would like to conclude that I mostly agree with her. A bit of nuance would be to see the interaction with the nature of data and the surveillance capabilities. AI on camera data are obviously surveillance. When it comes more blur it's what "surveillance" is for "code taken from the internet to train Github copilot method"? Or what is the surveillance capability from database of digital arts? Those questions seem to be much more relevant and hard in regard of the use of data for surveillance. AI is just a name of a method that we use to process big data at scale in this context.
Re: AI is fundamentally ‘a surveillance technology’
#13AI can be used as a surveillance technology. But it isn't fundamentally one, there are many other applications.
Re: AI is fundamentally ‘a surveillance technology’
#14this is a bad argument, it could be applied equally to all communication technology
It does. All communication technology is surveillance technology.
Re: AI is fundamentally ‘a surveillance technology’
#15Does 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.
> Not sure about this take. You need data at the end of the day, to
build good AI models.
I don't think she is saying that AI is predicated on surveillance as a source of training data (although that does happen in a few cases). She seems to be saying that surveillance is the primary use case for AI.
Actually I don't think that's true, consider manufacturing robots. However, mass surveillance, a societal scourge and urgent threat to democracy, does seem to be greatly enhanced by AI, so I think this is a bit of worry take.
> These days it feels like anyone's public takes are more or less just a means to promote their own cause.
Wasn't it always true? Trivially all people advocate their beliefs, with a few marginal exceptions like the guy who reads the weather report.
Re: AI is fundamentally ‘a surveillance technology’
#16Ironic 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?
[deleted]
Re: AI is fundamentally ‘a surveillance technology’
#17AI can be used as a surveillance technology. But it isn't fundamentally one, there are many other applications.
[deleted]
Re: AI is fundamentally ‘a surveillance technology’
#18This is a bit too much of a stretch. It's like saying that newspapers are fundamentally a gossip technology.
[deleted]
Re: AI is fundamentally ‘a surveillance technology’
#19AI can be used as a surveillance technology. But it isn't fundamentally one, there are many other applications.
Pretty sure the article is about what passes for AI these days and not AI in general
Re: AI is fundamentally ‘a surveillance technology’
#20This isn’t novel. So is the Internet itself. How do we protect against the downsides? Do we need a privacy bill of rights? I say yes.
[deleted]