Artificial intelligence still has some way to go

https://www.theregister.co.uk/2018/07/18/pinscreen_fraud_claims/

ha

Machine learning systems designed to keep learning on the job present opportunities for mischief, as this funny example of poisoning the training data from hackernews shows: https://t.co/r9GHp6vYKF pic.twitter.com/FMijdQcJTD

— Reuben Binns (@RDBinns) July 29, 2018

According to new reporting by WalesOnline, police in South Wales scanned the faces of more than 44,000 people at the “Biggest Weekend” event in Swansea earlier this year—and of those, there were only 10 false positives.
That’s a significant improvement over a similar trial run at a 2017 soccer championship in Cardiff, in which 92 percent were incorrect matches.

The South Wales Police have attributed the improved matching to a “new algorithm” from its contractor, NEC.

"With each deployment of the technology we have gained confidence in the technology, and this has enabled the developers at NEC to integrate our findings into their technology updates,” WalesOnline quoted the SWP as saying.

During the Biggest Weekend event, the facial recognition system flagged a person who had an outstanding arrest warrant, and officers took the person into custody.

In the United States, facial recognition is in use—it was recently used to identify the Capital Gazette shooter in Maryland—by some law enforcement and also at some airports.

Just last month, the American Civil Liberties Union used Amazon’s Rekognition tool to show that it falsely identified 28 members of Congress as people who had been arrested.

https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2018/08/uk-cops-used-facial-recognition-at-show-found-someone-with-outstanding-warrant/

if you don't have anything to hide, you don't have anything to worry about

how is this shit legal, jfc

don't answer that

machine learning is going to start WW3

quote me if we survive

the good news is that the young men and women of the senate and house who have the ultimate oversight oversight of such things in the US are really big into technology, what with your email and AOL memberships. they are definitely keeping an eye on all of this and understand what it all means

SCOOP: With secret access to NYPD CCTV @IBM created software which tags people based on their skin tone + hair/clothing color. IBM gave NYPD access, then pitched them on a new AI product which identifies people on camera as "Black," "White," and "Asian":https://t.co/4HuhciGhJL pic.twitter.com/tRKEK4Xwtg

— George Joseph (@georgejoseph94) September 6, 2018

Yikes. Might need a "shitty artificial intelligence still has the potential to ruin people's lives" thread

feels like there's no one at the wheel. these stories come out as scoops and leaks and exposes months or years after the fact, and then regulators pretty much have nothing to say about them. i know there's a shitload of stuff happening right now in the political spectrum, but this deserves a "national debate" as much as anything else does right now. the status quo/default is going to be for law enforcement to adopt these kind of technologies across the board, as much as possible. if nothing is done to prevent that now, it will be much more difficult to roll it back in the future, because the standard line would be "why are you take away a technology that has proven to help law enforcement prevent crime?", or whatever

Totally agree. The frustration for me in following surveillance tech news is that often the complaint boils down to "it doesn't work" rather than "this should be illegal in the first place." So like facial recognition is criticized for misidentifying people as if a 100% accurate system would be unproblematic.

reading this now and its pretty scary

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Life_3.0

It would be better I think if AI was limited to narrow AI and general AI was never developed but technology cannot be held back. It will be developed one day. I think any technological civilization will eventually develop any technology that can be developed.

My @nest doorbell automatically locks the front door when it sees a face it doesn't recognize. Today it didn't recognize me, so I went into the app to investigate and... pic.twitter.com/qcgE4Ii1pn

— B.J. May (@bjmay) September 17, 2018

Both funny, and prompting the question why would you have such a thing on your house?

Karl otm

Anyone see that bbc future technologies series from the last several years? Suggested the next war may be transhumans vs non modded peoples, like x men level stuff

the next war is probably going to look depressingly like Saudis bombing the shit out of Yemeni civilians far more than it will look like transhumans vs non modded peoples, and it will probably start less than a year from now. and another one will start the year after that.

The next war will have nothing to do with AI, and everything to do with natural idiocy

Yeah agree

combining this

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7Dg49wv2c_g

with this

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GuZGK7QolaE

equals a new circle of hell

see you all there

the use applications in the top video are so purposefully naive - if you team loses the big game, you can switch the jersey so that you're wearing the winning team's jersey!!!!

ooooooor, you could make the target a major political figure, make the major political figure say exactly what you want them to say in lifelike fashion, and send it to a bunch of people who still use aol accounts as their primary email addresses to confuse them!

NVIDIA's new vid2vid is the first open-source code that lets you fake anybody's face convincingly from one source video. prior "face2face" stuff was either cartoonish or proprietary. interesting times ahead... https://t.co/JsPVVa3xwa pic.twitter.com/AFhpeObd8N

— Gene Kogan (@genekogan) August 21, 2018

(btw i realize this stuff isn't AI, but it seems relevant)

(also, maybe facial recognition is not a very good long-term security strategy for unlocking phones)

I was recently wondering whether it was possible to truly articulate your research for the next ten years (a common question in grant applications) with just one example. I came up with this:

I’ve been thinking about the following problem: pic.twitter.com/P3hztqShZ3

— Allen Goodman (@0x00B1) October 3, 2018

perhaps a CV solution to spot the ball would be a good first step?

(has anyone done that, actually?)

I get the feeling lately that humanity will never be over taken by the machines because we will never make the machines - we will instead follow the path of Dune and strat breeding superintelligent ladies

the primary goal of all tech research is to make anime real

Amongst many other things it now occurs to me that dancing would be a lot easier if we were quadrupeds
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kHBcVlqpvZ8

no one's stopping you, friend

okay, the robot looking over its shoulder at the camera while it lewdly wiggles its but is cracking me up.

butt

i always fearmonger about this shit and no one cares, but

upgrading meat puppet to HD. as soon as i can get a good voice model, i’m going to make a parallel state of the union address pic.twitter.com/YPcuqxJMJB

— Gene Kogan (@genekogan) October 30, 2018

it won't be the end of the world, but in a few years things like this are going to work much, much better and the amount of disinformation out there is going to be absolutely insane. the solution is...some sort of embedded token in media files that "proves" the identity of whoever posted it...or something?

It'd be like possible to do some sort of certificate signing on every piece of media or whatever, but some asshole is going to insist on doing it with blockchain

anyway easier imo to stop consuming information

I know that we all hate the block chain, but since I'm a dummy could someone explain why it is so bad and hated?

personally i've always thought it could have legitimate use as a way of enforcing contracts (or confirming identity, in this case), but then again, i'm a dummy 2

I mean it's not not a like interesting-ish thing from a distributed systems point of view but like bitcoin now uses more electricity than Peru to manufacture fictional libertarian value tokens

oh yeah, i mean cryptocurrency is fucking terrible, particularly the kind that relies on mining. but that's not blockchain.

utilities are pretty excited about blockchain, here's an example:

https://www.greentechmedia.com/articles/read/wepower-is-the-first-blockchain-firm-to-tokenize-an-entire-grid

is it the crypto specific application or blockchain itself that's not efficient at scale?

the issue is that there's an incentive to join the distributed mining operation, and therefore people do in an attempt to turn electricity into libertarian value tokens, and the way the proof-of-work system works guarantees that a bunch of those miners will be burning a lot of cycles racing to verify transaction blocks but failing to do so.

idk I don't understand it but I instinctively loathe it

you guys know what MNIST is? it's 9.5MB of data. it would cost ~$100,000 to put that on the blockchain. so quite aside from the fact that the cryptocurrency applications are a scam, the actual practical distributed storage situation is ... not good.

Someone compiled a list of instances of AI doing what creators specify, not what they mean: https://t.co/OqoYN8MvMN pic.twitter.com/I1bgCFfO8c

— Jim Stormdancer (@mogwai_poet) November 7, 2018

this is why you should never tell your robot to cure world hunger

http://static.tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pub/images/tumblr_lm77uuW5G71qb98uxo1_500-2_dragged_6225.jpg

on the specific issue of deepfakes starting a war, i didn't find this essay as concretely comforting as i hoped i would, but it was interesting...

https://reallifemag.com/faked-out/

As long as mass media has existed in the West, there have been complaints about social acceleration, uncertainty, and the loss of a real, knowable world. In other words, our current conversations about the loss of reality are familiar; while each writer attempts to sound innovative, the concerns are evergreen. If the term “infocalypse” is useful, it is as a synonym for modernity, where truth is always two decades ago and dying today, and a new dark age always on the horizon.

i guess the two things i think are

1) infocalypse looks better on a page, but infopocalypse rolls off the tongue a little easier

2) as the article itself says near the end:

This analysis echoes philosopher Georges Bataille’s notion of “nonknowledge,” that the creation of knowledge always implies a corresponding creation of new fields of ignorance. Every revolution in information is also a revolution in misinformation. Information isn’t a light that shines down to answer questions; it also produces new unknowns, and possibilities for the unknown. Giving people more data and more information is as likely to create new readings and narratives than to align or “correct” beliefs. As Rob Horning recently put it, “any information, no matter how damaging it may seem to a particular side, can be put to any political use by any side; in fact no fact has any intrinsic meaning.” With each of modernity’s new technologies we are brought to recognize anew that belief precedes data rather than follows from it.

i don't know how to quantify the amount of information that is out there. not only the amount, but our ability to create it and share it, at a level of quality where an invented lie can more or less pass as something that could be true. but it seems like at least a metric shit ton to me. concerns about truth (and the ability capability to manipulate it) aren't new, but the potential scale for abuse seems much larger (and worrisome) now than ever before.

^^^

Someone took the neural net Yahoo trained to recognize NSFW pics and ran it "backwards" to generate images:

https://open_nsfw.gitlab.io/

whoa

the desert ones are really good