+++ /dev/null
-Title: Cloud Vision
-Date: 2021-01-01
-Category: other
-Tags: cathartic, news
-Status: draft
-
-Google [recently](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22373635) [sent](https://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/f6pyiu/cloud_vision_api_will_not_return_gendered_labels/) out an email to their [Cloud Vision API](https://cloud.google.com/vision) customers, notifying them that the service will stop returning "woman" or "man" labels for people in photos. Being charitable (as one does), I can think of reasons why I might defend or support such a decision. Detecting the _sex_ of humans in images is going to significantly less reliable than just picking out the humans in the photo, and the way the machines do sex-classification is going to depend on their training corpus, which might contain embedded cultural prejudices that [Google might not want to](https://ai.google/principles/) inadvertently use their technological hegemony to reproduce and amplify. Just using a "person" label dodges the whole problem.
-
-I think of my experience playing with [FaceApp](https://www.faceapp.com/), the _uniquely best piece of software in the world_, which lets the user apply neural-network-based transformations to their photos to see how their opposite-sex analogue would look! (Okay, the software actually has lots of transformations and filters available—
-
-[...]
-
-"Given that a person's gender cannot be inferred by appearance [...]" reads the email. _Cannot_ be inferred.
-
-This is [Cultural Revolution](https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/2671118186) shit! This is [Lysenko](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lysenkoism)-tier mindfuckery up in here!
-
-coronavirus, Elizabeth Warren
-
-https://twitter.com/ewarren/status/1230577418559270913
-
-
-
-> "We must be guided by solidarity, not stigma," the director general of the World Health Organization warned on Saturday. "The greatest enemy we face is not the virus itself; it’s the stigma that turns us against each other."
-https://twitter.com/nytimes/status/1229832977472946184
-https://archive.is/1pQ4p
projects / Ultimately_Untrue_Thought.git / blobdiff