Status Updates From Atlas da AI

In a bid for "mo' money" the AI companies (like Amazon) have secured contracts with which they can extend their tendrils to your doorstep. With the police, NSA or ICE's backing, the AI models can now fully racially profile you, giving you a social credit, in order to judge whether or not you're a terrorist. Anyway, who was Edward Snowden, and why was he relevant?

"some of those refugees are looking way too healthy not to be terrorists" (paraphrased)
Other than that, AI-bros definitely are human.

Starting with a faulty theory: that emotions are universally expressed in the same way, and thus can be read with a degree of certainty from the faces of people. The experiment is also flawed, but who cares? This set the base for AI's facial recognition, and mainly the same woo as lie detectors. Even the database is built mainly on white American people, which gives AI-agents even a racist streak.

okay i’m getting into it , it’s dense but annotating is helping me stay focused :’) there’s so many authors and books mentioned so my want to read queue is about to explode

In order for the AI to predict anything, it must be able to recognise what it's working with. Classification of objects is a relatively simple thing. However, when it comes to humans, it gets complicated. Not only are several identities vague at best, but complete ethnic categories are laden with racist (or colonial) subtext. There is also a whole point to be made about slurs being also used as categories.

" [IBM's researchers state]"aspects of our heritage (...) are reflected in our faces." This claim goes against decades of research that has challenged the idea that race, gender and identity are biological categories at all but are better understood as politically, culturally and socially constructed."
So, AI lobbed us some +/- 50 years in the past, racism-wise.

zaczynam z polecenia dr Kaczmarek!

Data, in the world of AI, is presented as something neutral, unbiased. This however is not the case: already in the 1980's datasets were created using sets of data, without questioning whether or not the data 'mining' (personal data now being seen as a natural resource) was ethical or not, whether or not it harmed a specific group in the way it was presented.

This chapter was about labour, and time-keeping. We've seen how AI is used in a Fordian sort of way closely watching the time expended by the workers, in order to make production more effective. A Panopticon of sorts, if you will.

Or an Amazon warehouse.

An introduction to the concept of the Potemkin-village and the Panopticon. Both have a certain relation to Gen-AI. The Panopticon because both that and AI are ways to keep an eye on a multitude of workers and/or prisoners by extending the least amount of labour.
The Potemkin-village (colloquially known as an "image d'Épinal" in French) because everything is a facade and covering the labour of actual people.