Read a couple of articles the past few weeks that highlighted something that not many of us are aware of, most of the data used to train AI deep learning (DL) models comes from us.
That is through our ignorance or tacit acceptation of licenses for apps that we use every day and for just walking around/interacting with the world.
The article in Atlantic, The AI supply chain runs on ignorance, talks about Ever, a picture sharing app (like Flickr), where users opted in to its facial recognition software to tag people in pictures. Ever also used that (tagged by machine or person) data to train its facial recognition software which it sells to government agencies throughout the world.
The second article, in Engadget , Colorado College students were secretly used to train AI facial recognition (software), talks about a group using a telephoto security camera than was pointed at a high traffic area on campus. The data obtained was used to help train an AI DL model to identify facial characteristics from far away.
The article went on to say that gathering photos from people in public places is not against the law. The study was also cleared by the school. The database was not released until after the students graduated but it did have information about the time and date the photos were taken.
But that’s nothing…
The same thing applies to video sharing and photo animation models, podcasting and text speaking models, blogging and written word generation models, etc. All this data is just lying around the web, freely available for any AI DL data engineer to grab and use to train their models. The article which included the image below talks about a new dataset of millions of webpages.
,Google photo search is scanning the web and has access to any photo posted to use for training data. Facebook, IG, and others have millions of photos that people are posting online every day, many of which are tagged, with information identifying people in the photos. I’m sure some where there’s a clause in a license agreement that says your photos, when posted on our app, no longer belong to you alone.
As security cameras become more pervasive, camera data will readily be used to train even more advanced facial recognition models without your say so, approval or even appreciation that it is happening. And this is in the first world, with data privacy and identity security protections paramount, imagine how the rest of the world’s data will be used.
With AI DL models, it’s all about the data. Yes much of it is messy and has to be cleaned up, massaged and sometimes annotated to be useful for DL training. But the origins of that training data are typically not disclosed to the AI data engineers nor the people that created it.
We all thought China would have a lead in AI DL because of their unfettered access to data, but the west has its own way to gain unconstrained access to vast amounts of data. And we are living through it today.
Yes AI DL models have the potential to drastically help the world, humanity and government do good things better. But a dark side to AI DL models also exist to help bad actors, organizations and even some government agencies do evil.
Caveat usor (May the user beware)
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Photo Credit(s): “Still Watching You” by jhcrow is licensed under CC BY-NC 2.0
“Computational Photography Homework 1 Results.” by kscottz is licensed under CC BY-NC 2.0
From Language models are unsupervised multi-task learners OpenAI research paper
