Skimmed through. Article says "Yahoo is the only one that is completely free to use but is self hosted hence not included in this" Is the set that yahoo released long ago the only self hosted option available? I have several projects that might end up using some of the yahoo release in order to stay self hosted. I can't imagine telling all users that we share all their pics with these third parties to check up on the…
stevenicr your'e right in that regard. Yahoo is the only one who has provided an on premises solution which is really sad. Even they haven't released the dataset of their images just the model. If more of these companies released open source models on a frequent basis we would all have less objectionable content on the internet. I guess the reason companies haven't done that and the reason Yahoo isn't really good is…
I believe many of these companies are keeping the models to themselves in an effort to stave off competition and try to be monopolies that can hope to get all the government cheese.
Unfortunately keeping the data to themselves in this regard is a disservice to the worldwide community in many unforeseen ways. Certainly they could keep contracts with big players just by providing the cloud computing powers and ease of setup, while offering updated models to others to use.
Maybe offer 99% accuracy to small site operators and 99.5% to contract API accounts or something.
It's more than just objectionable content for the net, it's other things too. Many apps and online connected services could benefit from running pics uploaded through a system that checks not only for nudity but also for age of people.
I could see adding some server space and cpu power to check images transferred for important issues like these - however I can't see sending all that data to third parties, sacrificing privacy of users while at the same time helping to make their proprietary model better without a stake of ownership in such.
Seriously this reminds me of facebook's "upload your nude pics to our system so we can notify you if someone tries to revenge porn share you nudes with third parties" - except that is people doing something consciously knowing they are sharing with fbook, it's employees and it's computer systems...
with these API calls, I would guess that most people who have their images run through them have no idea their pics are being shared with third parties, who are sometimes also putting the images in front of human moderators for further scrutiny.
I guess this kind of IP thing is happening with voice recognition stuff as well in many areas. At least there is more open source in that domain I believe.