Surface Tension | The Juice
Zumo Labs presents The Juice, a weekly newsletter focused on computer vision problems (and sometimes just regular problems). Get it while it’s fresh.
Week of July 19–23, 2021
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Lamya Robinson, a black teenager in Detroit, was dropped off at a local roller skating rink by her mother to hang out with friends. Not long after, she was put outside, alone, and told she was banned. The rink accused her of getting into a fight during a previous visit. Only thing? Robinson had never been there before.
Since you’re reading this in The Juice, you can probably guess where this is going. The facial recognition system the business uses misidentified Robinson as another customer, which is frustrating and unacceptable — but also not surprising. The ACLU has highlighted research by Joy Buolamwini, Deb Raji, and Timnit Gebru that shows some facial analysis algorithms misclassify Black women nearly 35 percent of the time. No wonder Robinson’s mother Juliea called it “basically racial profiling.”
But the takeaway here should not be equity in surveillance. What’s a skate rink doing with facial recognition software anyway? The lesson is that we need to be incredibly thoughtful about the new technologies we choose to introduce into society and how we go about doing so. This week’s stories focus on three of those technologies and the wisdom (or lack thereof) exercised in their rollout.
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#SeeNoEvil
The strongest state facial recognition ban in the country has passed unanimously in both chambers of the state legislature in Maine and done so with sweeping bipartisan support. National effort to regulate or ban the use of facial recognition technology has been bolstered recently by grassroots activists and the ACLU, who believe that “without democratic oversight, governments can use the technology as a tool for dragnet surveillance, threatening our freedoms of speech and association, due process rights, and right to be left alone.” Maine’s law differs from similar efforts, particularly in its defense of “ordinary Mainers.” It prohibits facial recognition in most government areas (including public schools), establishes standards for use and abuse potential, and requires probable cause be established before a request for the technology can be made.
Maine’s facial recognition law shows bipartisan support for protecting privacy, via TechCrunch.
#HearNoEvil
Holly Herndon is a composer, holds a Ph.D. from Stanford’s Center for Computer Research in Music and Acoustics, and is responsible for Pronto, an album released in 2019 with the help of a neural network named Spawn. She’s just announced Holly+, an artificial intelligence tool that allows users to “upload any polyphonic audio and receive a new version of that music sung in Herndon’s own voice.” Herndon developed Holly+ as an interdisciplinary inquiry into technology and art that embraces the deepfake technology she believes will be “standard practice” amongst creatives. A Decentralized Autonomous Organization manages issues of ownership surrounding Holly+. It consists of a select group to whom Herndon will give tokens representing “voting shares” that allow them to approve the software’s usage and receive the profits that don’t go toward future project funds.
Holly Herndon Releases AI Deepfake Tool That Lets Others Make Music With Her Voice, via Rolling Stone.
#SpeakNoEvil
A new documentary that offers an intimate look into the life and death of Anthony Bourdain features something unique: a synthetic replica, or deepfake, of Bourdain’s voice. The film does not acknowledge the use of the deepfake, which speaks several lines that Bourdain wrote but was never recorded saying. It has prompted the latest mainstream debate over the ethics of AI, with arguments about consent (particularly as it relates to a deceased individual) and the technology’s novelty and inherent uncanniness. Helen Rosner dives deep in the New Yorker, giving voice (wink) to the director, Tweeters, a video technology ethicist, Bourdain’s ex-wife, and MIT Technology Review’s editor for AI.
The Ethics of a Deepfake Anthony Bourdain Voice, via The New Yorker.
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📄 Paper of the Week
Solid-Fluid Interaction with Surface-Tension-Dominant Contact
It’s probably no surprise that we’re deeply invested in advances in simulation technology. This week, we wanted to highlight Dr. Károly Zsolnai-Fehér of Two Minute Papers — strong recommend — as he simulates three way coupling, enabling unbelievably realistic surface tension simulations. Photorealism may not be a requirement for effective synthetic data, but it sure does look good.
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