Category Archives: facial recognition

artificial intelligence, ethics, facial recognition, government, surveillance, technology

America May Not Be Ready for the Looming Tsunami of Deepfakes

Americans may not be ready for this tsunami wave of deepfakes. In our recent research, subjects struggled to distinguish between deepfakes and authentic videos. When we randomly assigned a set of deepfake and authentic videos to more than 2,000 individuals and asked them to pick the deepfake, our test subjects were wrong over one-third of the time. Perhaps unsurprisingly given the social media savviness of American youth, middle school students outperformed adults, including the educators who might be responsible for helping them learn key skills to avoid online misinformation. Even computer science students at a top U.S. engineering university were susceptible: They were unable to sort out deepfakes from authentic videos more than 20 percent of the time.

https://www.rand.org/blog/2022/11/america-may-not-be-ready-for-the-looming-tsunami.html?utm_campaign=&utm_content=1669147501&utm_medium=rand_social&utm_source=linkedin
artificial intelligence, dystopia, ethics, facial recognition, genetics, health, internet of things, society, surveillance, technology, the home, wearable technology

What Nietzsche can teach us about embracing risk and failure in an age of technological comforts

Safety through technology is certainly not a bad thing. But the need for safety can become pathological. Friedrich Nietzsche’s basic premise is that failure is an option. It is woven tightly into a life worth living. It is time for a personal inventory: Which of our devices and practices enable a life that experiences the world in ways and places not always engineered for our comfort?

https://bigthink.com/thinking/nietzsche-failure-comfort/
artificial intelligence, beauty, color, ethics, facial recognition, innovation, language, technology

Building a more inclusive way to search

Detecting a skin tone in an image is a challenging problem, because it depends a lot on lighting, shadows, how prominent a face is, blurriness, and many other factors. The most accurate way to detect a skin tone in a Pin’s image would be to have a human label every single Pin image according to a scientific skin tone palette. But with billions of unique images, and many more created each day, that’s an expensive approach that would be hard to scale.

https://medium.com/pinterest-engineering/building-a-more-inclusive-way-to-search-789f4c92fd73
artificial intelligence, dystopia, ethics, facial recognition, gender, genetics, health, politics, privacy, surveillance, the home

The Case of the Creepy Algorithm That ‘Predicted’ Teen Pregnancy

PHOTO-ILLUSTRATION: SAM WHITNEY; GETTY IMAGES

The system was based on data—including age, ethnicity, country of origin, disability, and whether the subject’s home had hot water in the bathroom—from 200,000 residents in the city of Salta, including 12,000 women and girls between the ages of 10 and 19. Though there is no official documentation, from reviewing media articles and two technical reviews, we know that “territorial agents” visited the houses of the girls and women in question, asked survey questions, took photos, and recorded GPS locations. What did those subjected to this intimate surveillance have in common? They were poor, some were migrants from Bolivia and other countries in South America, and others were from Indigenous Wichí, Qulla, and Guaraní communities.

https://www.wired.com/story/argentina-algorithms-pregnancy-prediction/

While Salta’s AI system to “predict pregnancy” was hailed as futuristic, it can only be understood in light of this long history, particularly, in Miranda’s words, the persistent eugenic impulse that always “contains a reference to the future” and assumes that reproduction “should be managed by the powerful.”

artificial intelligence, dystopia, ethics, facial recognition, forecasting, government, politics, privacy, society, surveillance, technology

Fake faces created by AI look more trustworthy than real people


Read more: https://www.newscientist.com/article/2308312-fake-faces-created-by-ai-look-more-trustworthy-than-real-people/#ixzz7LAFheaIq

“We need stricter ethical guidelines and more legal frameworks in place because, inevitably, there are going to be people out there who want to use [these images] to do harm, and that’s worrying,” – Dr. Sophie Nightingale, Lancaster University

AI Creates Photorealistic Portraits of Cartoon Characters

https://kottke.org/22/02/ai-creates-photorealistic-portraits-of-cartoon-characters