#HitoSteyerl - Mean #images#ai
"#SenseTime is an #ArtificialIntelligence firm that, until April 2019, provided surveillance software to #Chinese authorities that was used to monitor and track #Uighurs; it had been flagged numerous times as having potential links to human-rights violations. It seems the combination of my name and face was not only used to optimize #MachineVision for #RacialClassification, but that this optimization was swiftly put into practice to identify and track members of an ethnic minority in #China. The fact of my existence on the internet was enough to turn my face into a tool of literal #discrimination wielded by an actually existing digital autocracy. [...] We interviewed [...] S., a student who did an internship in an ai start-up that offered personalized luxury travel recommendations to the better-off. His company’s communication strategy emphasized automation, with a recommender system allegedly based on users’ preferences extracted from social media. But behind the scenes, it outsourced all its processes to micro-providers in #Madagascar. It did no #MachineLearning" https://newleftreview.org/issues/ii140/articles/hito-steyerl-mean-images