'Many mobile applications use machine learning or AI systems called “vision models” to look at images on a user’s phone and extract data, which can be useful in facial recognition or in verifying a user’s age. These models can collect a lot of other information too, including demographic info, objects in a photo, and possible locations, though it’s not clear what, if anything, this data is used for...'
Machine Vision: How Algorithms Are Changing the Way We See the World by Jill Walker Rettberg, 2023
Providing an overview of the historical and contemporary uses of machine vision, she unpacks how technologies such as smart surveillance cameras and TikTok filters are changing the way we see the world and one another.
'We discovered that Microsoft Word will now automatically generate Alt Text (alternative text) descriptions of the images you insert into your documents after it described an Ethiopic scroll as a roll of toilet paper. Clearly the robots have some training to do on cultural heritage materials.'
Daily Inspiration: "The real magic begins once we start to chat with the machines" - Futurist Jim Carroll
In the TV series The Jetsons, the humans regularly talked to the robots.
That future isn't that far away. Watch the video in which the Google DeepMind research group is using ChatGPT-like commands to instruct a robotic arm to use its machine vision to identify and work with a particular object. In this case, it's been asked to identify and lift the extinct animal. It's figured out which animal figure is the extinct one, utilizing its AI-based machine-vision analysis, and proceeds accordingly. Imagine this - the next command could be something as simple as this - "Find the king of the jungle and place it next to the sports item used by LeBron James." Magical!
The full details of this not-too-small achievement can be found on an extensive page that details all the work behind the scenes: "RT-2: Vision-Language-Action Models: Transfer Web Knowledge to Robotic Control."
In other words, we're learning how to use large language models - the tech behind Bard, ChatGPT, and Bing -- to figure out what to do and translate these results into actions that are given to the robots.
#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