Images of women coerced by adult companies poison dataset popularised by deepfake smut creators
- Reference: 1605528906
- News link: https://www.theregister.co.uk/2020/11/16/ai_in_brief/
- Source link:
The images, [1]reviewed by Vice's Samantha Cole, come from Czech Casting and Girls Do Porn – companies that have been associated with claims of human trafficking and rape. Girls Do Porn has paid millions of dollars in damages following lawsuits filed on behalf of women who said they were tricked and forced into shooting porn videos. In fact, the founder of the sleazy biz is on the FBI's most wanted list.
One developer acknowledged that the dataset was problematic, but believes the pursuit of so-called deepfakes will automatically solve these problems in the future. Since the actors are completely fake and generated using computer vision, it's less likely to harm real people.
The potential for abuse doesn't magically go away, however. As the faces and bodies are based on real data, it's possible that the deepfakes could resemble a human enough that people mistakenly believe it's someone they've seen in real life.
Uber to sell off its self-driving IP
Uber shuttered its autonomous driving arm when it axed thousands of employees during the coronavirus pandemic, and it's trying to peddle it off to a self-driving startup.
Aurora Innovation, an upstart founded by ex-Google, Tesla, and Uber employees, is now in talks to buy the Uber Advanced Technologies Group (UATG), [2]according to TechCrunch. Both sides have been negotiating a potential deal since October, and did not disclose any financial details. UATG was valued at $7.25bn nearly two years ago.
Pay $200 to stalk people in Russia using facial-recognition services
Police in Moscow are investigating how images snapped by the city's surveillance cameras are used by dodgy facial-recognition services to help snoopers spy on people.
A digital activist [3]told Reuters she saw an advert touting a service that returns photographs of people snapped in public, including the time and location of where they were taken. She gave them a picture of herself and paid them 16,000 roubles – about $200 – and was shocked to find that it was able to record where she had been.
These types of services are unregulated, and could be used for nefarious purposes like checking whether someone has left their house for burglary or to stalk ex-partners. These ads are posted in Telegram, a popular messaging service used in Russia. Now a lawsuit has been filed at the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) by activists and opposition politician Vladimir Milov, who claimed that facial recognition was used to identify attendees at a rally.
Help train Google's machine-learning algos
If you're a user of Google Photos, you can help the company train its computer-vision algorithms by labelling your own images.
At the bottom of the search tab in the app, there's a box titled "Help improve Google Photos". If you click on it, it takes you to a screen with four options where you can describe your photos in a few sentences or select ones that are appropriate for a specific holiday. It's only available on Android devices that have Google Photos version 5.18, 9to5Google [4]reported .
All of this will make it easier for Google to train its algorithms to sort through your albums when you're looking for photos from events like Christmas parties or Thanksgiving or particular people or objects.
Labelling data is a huge chore, and crowdsourcing the job gives Google a free way to complete the task. Engineers will no doubt have to clean the data further before it's used to train the machine learning models. ®
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[1] https://www.vice.com/en/article/akdgnp/sexual-abuse-fueling-ai-porn-deepfake-czech-casting-girls-do-porn
[2] https://techcrunch.com/2020/11/13/uber-in-talks-to-sell-atg-self-driving-unit-to-aurora/
[3] https://www.reuters.com/article/us-russia-privacy-lawsuit-feature-trfn-idUSKBN27P10U
[4] https://9to5google.com/2020/11/09/improve-google-photos/
[5] https://whitepapers.theregister.com/
Re: crowdsourcing the job gives Google
And now they want you to pay to do it also, as its no longer unlimited space to store your photos for their training data set.
Police in Moscow are investigating ..
Is that what they call saying, "We are busy drinking coffee and will give the matter the urgent attention it requires"?
Re: Police in Moscow are investigating ..
You would get a similar reaction in the UK but it would be tea not coffee, if you are really lucky you might get a crime number for 'stuff'.
Given the high ratio of cams:people in the UK I suspect it would doable there too. If it isn't already.
As a side note, Telegram is used all over the world, is owned by two Russian brothers who live in Switzerland, so is not strictly a Russian message service. The Russian government is apparently not that happy with it because of encryption and the lack of rear entry.
"The Russian government is apparently not happy because of the lack of rear entry."
Is that their main concern with Telegram, or with Czech Casting?
My pics are easy to transcribe.
It's because they're also all that porn that they want to identify. Have fun sorting my smut!
"As the faces and bodies are based on real data, it's possible that the deepfakes could resemble a human enough that people mistakenly believe it's someone they've seen in real life."
You know when you see someone (IRL) that you think you know but in reality don't? No need for deepfakes for that, human phenotypes are not unlimited and two unrelated people might look alike.
You're training an AI algorithm to recognise pr0n pics. You show it a load of pr0n pics.
END OF BLOODY STORY.
Where those pr0n pics came from is of no interest and nor should it be. You must have a wide selection of realistic and genuine data for training. Some how "cleaning" the data according to some holier-than-thou ruling merely serves to bias the dataset with inevitable undesirable effects on the resulting algorithm.
You may not like the original source of the data, but it already exists to be used. If you want your AI algorithm to recognise that sort of picture, it has to be trained on it.
“You must have a wide selection of realistic and genuine data for training.” Even if that data has been obtained/created illegally through rape trafficking etc.
So you are saying it is ok to create a product and make money from rape trafficking etc using data you have no right to.
Also how are they obtaining this data just scraping it without the sites permission. Stealing it.
Or buying it from the sites. Funding rape and trafficking.
crowdsourcing the job gives Google
And people are naive enough to do it. This sort of exploitation and much else from Google and all of Facebook's Empire needs banned to protect the majority of humans that don't understand what is happening.