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Ed Webb

'There is no standard': investigation finds AI algorithms objectify women's bodies | Ar... - 0 views

www.theguardian.com/...i-algorithms-racy-women-bodies

AI internet analysis algorithms censorship gender sexuality bias

shared by Ed Webb on 12 Feb 23 - Cached
  • AI tags photos of women in everyday situations as sexually suggestive. They also rate pictures of women as more “racy” or sexually suggestive than comparable pictures of men.
  • “You cannot have one single uncontested definition of raciness.”
  • “Objectification of women seems deeply embedded in the system.”
  • ...7 more annotations...
  • Shadowbanning has been documented for years, but the Guardian journalists may have found a missing link to understand the phenomenon: biased AI algorithms. Social media platforms seem to leverage these algorithms to rate images and limit the reach of content that they consider too racy. The problem seems to be that these AI algorithms have built-in gender bias, rating women more racy than images containing men.
  • “You are looking at decontextualized information where a bra is being seen as inherently racy rather than a thing that many women wear every day as a basic item of clothing,”
  • suppressed the reach of countless images featuring women’s bodies, and hurt female-led businesses – further amplifying societal disparities.
  • these algorithms were probably labeled by straight men, who may associate men working out with fitness, but may consider an image of a woman working out as racy. It’s also possible that these ratings seem gender biased in the US and in Europe because the labelers may have been from a place with a more conservative culture
  • “There’s no standard of quality here,”
  • “I will censor as artistically as possible any nipples. I find this so offensive to art, but also to women,” she said. “I almost feel like I’m part of perpetuating that ridiculous cycle that I don’t want to have any part of.”
  • many people, including chronically ill and disabled folks, rely on making money through social media and shadowbanning harms their business
Ed Webb

The powerful and mysterious brain circuitry that makes us love Google, Twitter, and tex... - 0 views

www.slate.com/...all

twitter neuroscience brain yoffe internet socialmedia addiction

shared by Ed Webb on 14 Aug 09 - Cached
  • For humans, this desire to search is not just about fulfilling our physical needs. Panksepp says that humans can get just as excited about abstract rewards as tangible ones. He says that when we get thrilled about the world of ideas, about making intellectual connections, about divining meaning, it is the seeking circuits that are firing.
  • Our internal sense of time is believed to be controlled by the dopamine system. People with hyperactivity disorder have a shortage of dopamine in their brains, which a recent study suggests may be at the root of the problem. For them even small stretches of time seem to drag.
  • When we get the object of our desire (be it a Twinkie or a sexual partner), we engage in consummatory acts that Panksepp says reduce arousal in the brain and temporarily, at least, inhibit our urge to seek.
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  • But our brains are designed to more easily be stimulated than satisfied. "The brain seems to be more stingy with mechanisms for pleasure than for desire," Berridge has said. This makes evolutionary sense. Creatures that lack motivation, that find it easy to slip into oblivious rapture, are likely to lead short (if happy) lives. So nature imbued us with an unquenchable drive to discover, to explore. Stanford University neuroscientist Brian Knutson has been putting people in MRI scanners and looking inside their brains as they play an investing game. He has consistently found that the pictures inside our skulls show that the possibility of a payoff is much more stimulating than actually getting one.
  • all our electronic communication devices—e-mail, Facebook feeds, texts, Twitter—are feeding the same drive as our searches. Since we're restless, easily bored creatures, our gadgets give us in abundance qualities the seeking/wanting system finds particularly exciting. Novelty is one. Panksepp says the dopamine system is activated by finding something unexpected or by the anticipation of something new. If the rewards come unpredictably—as e-mail, texts, updates do—we get even more carried away. No wonder we call it a "CrackBerry."
  • If humans are seeking machines, we've now created the perfect machines to allow us to seek endlessly. This perhaps should make us cautious. In Animals in Translation, Temple Grandin writes of driving two indoor cats crazy by flicking a laser pointer around the room. They wouldn't stop stalking and pouncing on this ungraspable dot of light—their dopamine system pumping. She writes that no wild cat would indulge in such useless behavior: "A cat wants to catch the mouse, not chase it in circles forever." She says "mindless chasing" makes an animal less likely to meet its real needs "because it short-circuits intelligent stalking behavior." As we chase after flickering bits of information, it's a salutary warning.
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