Since I read the paper magazine, I’m glad my partner hipped me to this article in the online edition of the New Yorker. The general angle is the author, Matthew Hutson goes to a few AI conferences and summarizes what’s being presented, and debated.
Why it’s interesting
Since a lot of research is published only as the proceedings, papers, and poster sessions at conferences, it’s an especially inside view of an industry that’s technically heavy and abstract enough that even people in the industry probably don’t understand a lot of the underlying concepts. I speak for myself reader, but don’t worry, I won’t judge.
Why we care
I know that the CV people are into some questionable stuff, such as using models trained on small samples of photographs scraped from the internet to identify people in video streams, and much, much worse.
Since I’d expected that was likely to be business run amok, it had not occurred to me that the people doing the research come up with bonkers, idiotic ideas, not the business folks. Mentioned here is a sample of speech to generate a physical image of a person.
Even though we do this as people, it with all of our lifetime data and all of our senses and cognitive ability. And we get it wrong quite a bit. Maybe even most of the time. It’s our ability to do many things at once and reinterpret our perception that allows this to be useful, not the raw percepts.
Guess I’ll be keeping an eye on the camera vision people from now on.
Links
https://www.newyorker.com/tech/annals-of-technology/who-should-stop-unethical-ai
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