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, 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.
+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
projects / Ultimately_Untrue_Thought.git / blobdiff