Soon, we will be watched over by algorithms
An article in Techcrunch looks at Tuputech, a Chinese algorithmic image analysis and processing company based in Guangzhou specializing in detecting pornographic or violent content through deep learning on China’s heavily censored internet.
The company is at the cutting edge of this type of detection, which until now has largely depended on human supervision and verification. At a time when growing numbers of countries are now imposing hefty fines on platforms that publish this kind of content, Tuputech has established a considerable competitive advantage thanks to its ability to check some 900 million images a day, process around 50 each second and to identify pornography and violent images with a 99.5% success rate. I have been saying for a number of years that China has become a laboratory for creating and testing digital tools aimed at curbing basic freedoms, and that are later adopted by supposedly democratic governments.
What happens when online censorship is no longer carried out by people, but instead by deep learning algorithms that are constantly being trained? And what about when that technology is no used simply to detect pornography of violent content, but instead is applied to anything a government doesn’t wish people to see? What is to prevent such algorithms being trained for other uses? Quite simply that the freedom the internet once presented us with has turned into a means of total control at the hands of an algorithm. If a government wants to decide what its population sees, it no longer needs to employ half the population to watch over what the other half is looking at online, it simply has to train the right algorithms. Restricting access to encrypted services, VPNs and proxies is the next logical step. The internet is for porn? Only until an algorithm decides otherwise.
Sitting in front of our screens, overseen by algorithms that tell us what we can and cannot see… Some people might argue that an internet free of pornography and violence is a good thing, but they are mistaken, not knowing what comes later. Tuputech, a company created in the shadow of China’s censorship, will attract a lot of attention from governments around the world in the coming months and years, and that is not a good sign for the future…
(En español, aquí)
