The AI Defending Ukraine
AI can now combine cyber-warfare and psychological-warfare.
It seems these days AI can make everything better, from engineering insanely fast cars to making farms more efficient, to even unlocking the elusive power of nuclear fusion. But in Ukraine a controversial AI is being repurposed to undermine the Russian war machine. The potential damage it could cause the Russians is enormous, but some question if it should be used at all? So, welcome to the murky water that is Clearview AI.
Firstly, what is Clearview AI? In a nutshell, it is an incredibly powerful facial recognition AI, able to identify people in photos with high accuracy even after a facial injury. That part isn’t the controversial part. Instead, it is where Clearview gets its data from. To work, it needs a truly gigantic dataset of photos. These photos also need to be linked to a name, email address or another form of identity. Rather than go about this honestly Clearview scrapes this data off social media. So those hundreds of photos of you on Facebook that you’re tagged in? Clearview has likely saved all of them, linked them to your address, name and even electoral roll, and trained their AI to spot you in any image.
Many see this as a violation of privacy. In fact, the EU sees it as a massive breach of data protection. So they have banned…
