Ukraine using Clearview AI to identify slain Russian soldiers
- Reference: 1648467911
- News link: https://www.theregister.co.uk/2022/03/28/in_brief_ai/
- Source link:
"As a courtesy to the mothers of those soldiers, we are disseminating this information over social media to at least let families know that they've lost their sons and to then enable them to come to collect their bodies," Ukraine's vice prime minister and head of the ministry of digital transformation, Mykhailo Fedorov, [2]told Reuters.
Clearview AI, a New York-based startup, initially made headlines when CEO Hoan Thon-That admitted to [3]scraping billions of images from social media sites like Instagram and Twitter to build a large database. Its [4]facial recognition algorithms are trained to match against images in that database given a photograph. By linking people's selfies to their social media accounts, their identity can be uncovered.
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The upstart's technology has raised alarm bells. The company faces international fines, and was ordered to cease operations in some countries. Despite this, the biz continues to grow and now its facial recognition is being used in the Russian invasion of Ukraine.
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A free and open 20-billion-parameter language model
The recent phenomenon of language models in AI has launched new technological capabilities, but the best state-of-the-art systems are difficult to access and study.
[11]Tesla employee: I was fired after sharing video of self-driving car crash
[12]Driver in Uber's self-driving car death goes on trial, says she feels 'betrayed'
[13]Customer service chatbot sector forecast to be worth $7bn this year
[14]Clearview AI plans tech to ID faces as they age, seek big government deals
Now there's an open-source 50-billion-parameter language model named GPT-NeoX-20B that anyone can use for free built by Eleuther AI, a group of developers and researchers collaborating with one another to make the technology public.
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There is a lot of interest in solving issues of bias, toxic language, or misinformation generated by these language models, but it's difficult to tackle them if you can't access the machine's inner workings. Eleuther has been steadily building and releasing increasingly larger models relying on companies like Google or CoreWeave to donate free hardware to train them.
GPT-NeoX-20B succeeds GPT-J-6B and is currently the largest open-source language model although they're both smaller than commercial systems that contain hundreds of billions of parameters. Another group effort from the BigScience team is currently training a separate open-source 176-billion-parameter language model that has not been released yet. ®
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[1] https://www.theregister.com/2022/03/14/ukraine-clearview-facial-recognition-war/
[2] https://www.reuters.com/technology/ukraine-uses-facial-recognition-identify-dead-russian-soldiers-minister-says-2022-03-23
[3] https://www.theregister.com/2021/11/30/uk_clearview_fine/
[4] https://www.theregister.com/2021/11/03/uk_australia_clearview_probe/
[5] https://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/jump?co=1&iu=/6978/reg_software/aiml&sz=300x50%7C300x100%7C300x250%7C300x251%7C300x252%7C300x600%7C300x601&tile=2&c=2YkHbtn75EiY-Alsk444RSgAAAEY&t=ct%3Dns%26unitnum%3D2%26raptor%3Dcondor%26pos%3Dtop%26test%3D0
[6] https://venturebeat.com/2021/11/09/ai-driven-search-engine-you-com-takes-on-google-with-20m/
[7] https://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/jump?co=1&iu=/6978/reg_software/aiml&sz=300x50%7C300x100%7C300x250%7C300x251%7C300x252%7C300x600%7C300x601&tile=4&c=44YkHbtn75EiY-Alsk444RSgAAAEY&t=ct%3Dns%26unitnum%3D4%26raptor%3Dfalcon%26pos%3Dmid%26test%3D0
[8] https://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/jump?co=1&iu=/6978/reg_software/aiml&sz=300x50%7C300x100%7C300x250%7C300x251%7C300x252%7C300x600%7C300x601&tile=3&c=33YkHbtn75EiY-Alsk444RSgAAAEY&t=ct%3Dns%26unitnum%3D3%26raptor%3Deagle%26pos%3Dmid%26test%3D0
[9] https://www.aixventures.com/announcements/introducing-aix-ventures
[10] https://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/jump?co=1&iu=/6978/reg_software/aiml&sz=300x50%7C300x100%7C300x250%7C300x251%7C300x252%7C300x600%7C300x601&tile=4&c=44YkHbtn75EiY-Alsk444RSgAAAEY&t=ct%3Dns%26unitnum%3D4%26raptor%3Dfalcon%26pos%3Dmid%26test%3D0
[11] https://www.theregister.com/2022/03/21/in_brief_ai/
[12] https://www.theregister.com/2022/03/14/in_brief_ai/
[13] https://www.theregister.com/2022/03/07/in_brief_ai/
[14] https://www.theregister.com/2022/02/28/in_brief_ai/
[15] https://spectrum.ieee.org/eleutherai-openai-not-open-enough
[16] https://whitepapers.theregister.com/
Re: Fallen soldier identification
Is it not against the Geneva convention to publicly identify fallen solders ?
Article 4 of the 1929 Geneva Convention indicates that combatants should strive to identify and report deaths. Subsequent Geneva Conventions say the same thing. [Ref. 1] So, the Ukraine's claim of doing this to alert parents is legally correct, if non-traditional. Given the Ukraine's likely additional motivations of trying to demoralize Russians, the matter's more questionable.
On that note, the Washington Post (among others) is arguing that showing the bodies of fallen soldiers violated the Geneva Conventions' requirement to protect POWs from "insults and public curiosity." The idea behind this clause was that POWs shouldn't be paraded through streets where they could be beaten, humiliated, showed with unpleasant materials, etc. This clause pre-dated widespread photo journalism and TV broadcasts, leading to the UK's guidance for journalists [Ref. 2]. The general idea is, "Don't show living POWs, particularly if their dignity is compromised." The US raised a fuss about the 2016 incident where Iran captured sailors and released images of them [Ref. 3]. The Ukraine's release of videos of Russia POWs earlier in March falls afoul of this rule.
However, most material on "insults and public curiosity" emphasize treatment of the living. The Geneva Conventions' guidance on bodies of the dead is more nebulous with respect to sharing photographs [Ref. 4]. The Conventions are pretty clear that fallen soldiers' bodies should not be mutilated and should be treated with dignity. It's likely that someone could formally object to the Ukraine's use of Clearview and alerting (or taunting) parents of fallen soldiers as a violation of the bodies' dignity.
Note: my search was not exhaustive so I might've missed precedents where photographs of the dead constituted a war crime.
REFERENCES
[1] [1]International Red Cross's position on identifying war dead
[2] [2]UK's interpretation of insults and public curiosity
[3] [3]Captured US sailors: legal implications
[4] [4]Treatment of dead soldiers
[1] https://ihl-databases.icrc.org/customary-ihl/eng/docindex/v2_rul_rule116
[2] https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/public-curiosity-in-the-1949-geneva-conventions-uk-government-and-british-red-cross-interpretation/public-curiosity-in-the-1949-geneva-conventions-the-interpretation-developed-by-the-government-of-the-united-kingdom-of-great-britain-and-northern
[3] https://www.lawfareblog.com/irans-photographs-navy-sailors-war-crime-or-just-outrage
[4] https://ihl-databases.icrc.org/customary-ihl/eng/docindex/v1_rul_rule113
Do Russian soldiers have an ID number on their uniform? If so, it would seem to me that the Ukrainians' humanitarian duty to relatives would be satisfied by telling the Russian military that ID. This soubds a bit like a propoganda tool being used as a PR stunt by the technology company involved.
Also, false positives, anyone? Fatal injuries can be messy things.
Do Russian soldiers have an ID number on their uniform? If so, it would seem to me that the Ukrainians' humanitarian duty to relatives would be satisfied by telling the Russian military that ID.
The real problem here is the Russian military denying the info and not informing the next of kin. And the numbers are rapidly approaching the level were manual processing isn't feasible anymore.
Also a useful 'German tank wheels' attack
If you can identify the people killed in each unit and what regions they came from you can work out if units are conscripts/'volunteers' from poor republics or spread from all over country = probably professionals
Fallen soldier identification
Is it not against the Geneva convention to publicly identify fallen solders ?
There is the red cross crescent for this ..
If I'd lost my child in war,
I would want to know,
but I'd rather not find it looking on a web site,
or via an email,