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DIY Facial Recognition For Porn Is a Dystopian Disaster (vice.com) 532

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Vice News: Someone posting on Chinese social network Weibo claims to have used facial recognition to cross-reference women's photos on social media with faces pulled from videos on adult platforms like Pornhub. In a Monday post on Weibo, the user, who says he's based in Germany, claimed to have "successfully identified more than 100,000 young ladies" in the adult industry "on a global scale." According to Weibo posts, the user and some of his programming friends used facial recognition to detect faces in porn content using photos from social platforms. His reasoning for making this program, he wrote, is "to have the right to know on both sides of the marriage." After public outcry, he later claimed his intention was to allow women, with or without their fiancees, to check if they are on porn sites and to send a copyright takedown request.

Whether the Weibo user's claims are trustworthy or not is beside the point, now that experts in feminist studies and machine learning have decried this project as algorithmically-targeted harassment. This kind of program's existence is both possible and frightening, and has started a conversation around whether such a program would be an ethically or legally responsible use of AI. Just as we saw with deepfakes, which used AI to swap the faces of female celebrities onto the bodies of porn performers, the use of machine learning to control and extort women's bodily autonomy demonstrates deep misogyny. It's a threat that didn't begin with deepfakes, but certainly reached a public sphere with that technology -- although in the years since, women have been left behind in the mainstream narrative, which has focused on the technology's possible use for disinformation.

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DIY Facial Recognition For Porn Is a Dystopian Disaster

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  • by Anonymous Coward

    Why does the /. summary portray this as an issue only affecting women? It sounds like it could affect everyone, regardless of gender.

    • by giampy ( 592646 ) on Wednesday May 29, 2019 @10:51PM (#58676760) Homepage

      There is a cultural bias that makes having sex for fun or gain much worse for women than men. Well that probably originates from a "natural" bias due to pregnancy and so on. So the issue affects women disproportionally.

      If we could get rid of this cultural bias (and i hope we will one day) then the issue would affect both sexes equally. And in that case it wouldn't be an issue at all if having sex would be regarded just like a normal activity that nobody could be blackmailed for.

      But then again it won't happen anytime soon so right now it does not affect both sexes equally. Plus the guy said that he just used to reveal women's faces not "actors" faces.

      • by c6gunner ( 950153 ) on Wednesday May 29, 2019 @11:08PM (#58676850) Homepage

        There is a cultural bias that makes having sex for fun or gain much worse for women than men.

        Much better actually. Female porn stars make way more money than male porn stars.

        • Re: (Score:2, Insightful)

          by dryeo ( 100693 )

          Due to needing to pay more to overcome the cultural bias.

        • by aepervius ( 535155 ) on Thursday May 30, 2019 @02:55AM (#58677626)
          The reason women in porn have a much better pay is a reason of demand versus offer. Far more demand for porn with women than men, and they are usually the center subject, and man being a side. But if you look at *social* interaction , most men will assume porn star are more or less whore, and if told one is a porn star they will assume she is an easy girl to have for money , NOT relationship/marriage material. The same for prostitute , the social taint is profound.

          But if a man state he has done porn on the side ? So far as I can tell from an example I know at work, a few chuckle at the water cooler, a few glint of jealousy from other men, but no real social taint.

          Women which do sex for fun or gain have it far far worse than men. Men and women alike view them socially negatively. They may profit off/from them, have fun, but on the social scale, they are definitively have it worst.
          • by tomhath ( 637240 )
            Men will do porn videos for fun. Women do them for drug money.
          • by ceoyoyo ( 59147 ) on Thursday May 30, 2019 @08:46AM (#58678768)

            Hm... girl tells date that she's done porn. He might get some ideas, but the date is probably going to continue.

            Guy tells girl he's done porn. Somehow I think that one has more of a chance of ending quickly.

            Society is hung up on sex in all sorts of ways. It's not as simple as girls should be virgins, guys should fuck everything that moves.

            The real question: is it societally important that people be able to act in porn, have it published, and remain anonymous?

          • But if you look at *social* interaction , most men will assume porn star are more or less whore, and if told one is a porn star they will assume she is an easy girl to have for money

            That's not so much an assumption at that point as it is a demonstrable fact.

            NOT relationship/marriage material.

            Sure, I wouldn't want to marry a female porn star. I wouldn't want to marry a male one, either.

            But if a man state he has done porn on the side ? So far as I can tell from an example I know at work, a few chuckle at the water cooler, a few glint of jealousy from other men, but no real social taint.

            What exactly is this "social taint" you keep banging on about? You haven't demonstrated one thusfar.

            Women which do sex for fun or gain have it far far worse than men. Men and women alike view them socially negatively. They may profit off/from them, have fun, but on the social scale, they are definitively have it worst.

            You've got to be kidding. Female porn stars have fan clubs; male porn stars barely get noticed. How many male porn stars can you even name off the top of your head?

        • There is a cultural bias that makes having sex for fun or gain much worse for women than men.

          Much better actually. Female porn stars make way more money than male porn stars.

          I wonder the last person who searched for a porn using the males name instead of females or even gave a shit who the male in it was. Well, women and gays probably but they are the subset of porn consumers.

      • by Tom ( 822 ) on Wednesday May 29, 2019 @11:43PM (#58676994) Homepage Journal

        There is a cultural bias that makes having sex for fun or gain much worse for women than men. Well that probably originates from a "natural" bias due to pregnancy and so on.

        The "natural" explanation is highly unlikely. Most monkeys (our closest genetic relatives) are pretty open with sex including sex for fun and sex for gain - in their case not money, but social peace and calming each other down.

        We have a little bit of evidence to suggest that primitive humans were probably similar and neolithic children were raised by the tribe, not the biological parents and probably nobody was quite sure who the father was anyway.

        The cultural bias is exactly that: cultural. It is most likely that it came into being with the concept of inheritance and marriage, when being married to someone started giving you a right to their stuff, and their stuff started to include their parents stuff. Suddenly the parents had a reason to pick their childrens future spouses carefully. Don't forget that in many cultures, having a choice in marriage is actually a fairly recent concept and most marriages throughout history were arranged.

        • by DrSpock11 ( 993950 ) on Thursday May 30, 2019 @07:57AM (#58678430)

          In primates, and in many other species, the mother cares for her own young. They are not raised "by the tribe". Thus, having children is a major life-altering event for females of many species.

          In fact, your core contention that there is no biological cost to pregnancy and thus no reason for women to be selective about mates runs contrary to just about every piece of evidence we have from 150 years of studying evolution. Many traits have evolved on males of various species specifically for signaling to females of that species that the male would make a superior sexual partner. The elaborate horns of bucks, as just one of countless examples. Females needing to be selective about their sexual partners is a core component of reproduction and driver of evolution.

    • Re: (Score:3, Informative)

      by Z00L00K ( 682162 )

      Big brother's watching you [youtube.com] and all you have to do is consume, consume and consume.

    • Porn rarely shows the faces of men.
    • "Why does the /. summary portray this as an issue only affecting women? It sounds like it could affect everyone, regardless of gender."

      You don't seem to be a porn aficionado or you would know, that to be able to recognize most male performers, you would need a Cock Recognition Algorithm or at least a Tatoo Recognition Algorithm.

  • Misrepresentation (Score:3, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday May 29, 2019 @10:38PM (#58676668)

    The algorithm isn't controlling or extorting anything. It is just doing detective work which humans could easily do manually. It simply reduces the man-hours needed.

    Extortion and harassment are illegal, whether or not algorithms are involved. Attempting to make such algorithms illegal is just tech-suppression to no good end.

    Instead, we should educate our children as to the power of such algorithms, so they don't star in porn videos when they are young-and-stupid adults. Then they won't have to worry about regretting the truth later when their fiancée finds out.

    • At the end of the day its just facial recognition applied in a new way. What's to say you couldn't run it against regular films to find out if someone is a failed actor or something, or on crowd photos to see if a given person is in it (assuming you had a photo with an infinite resolution or something so all the faces could be examined)
  • by stikves ( 127823 ) on Wednesday May 29, 2019 @10:46PM (#58676716) Homepage

    Unfortunate as it is, the project seems to be based on public data. This is a catch-22, we would want free access to public data, but this brings controversial studies like this one.

    But the larger issue is the false positives. Even if the algorithms were 99% correct (which is unlikely), among 200,000 people that means 4,000 wrongly broken marriages. That is not acceptable. In fact in these kind of "social" research with publicly naming people, even 0% false positive is problematic (i.e.: not everyone wants to be named).

    Interesting times indeed. Our society and laws, and public education will need to catch up with the not-so-friendly technological progress.

    • by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday May 29, 2019 @10:58PM (#58676794)

      Even if the algorithms were 99% correct (which is unlikely), among 200,000 people that means 4,000 wrongly broken marriages. That is not acceptable.

      Are you married? If I, or my wife, were one of these false positives, and the other person were aware, we would watch the movie to see if they other person was actually in it. Maybe even with popcorn. Then, if one of us were, we'd probably try and see when the video were first published to establish a timeline.

      I try and base my marriage on trust, rather than looking for excuses to end things. That's just me, and I haven't been married that long though... Maybe in a few years I'll see things like this as an excuse for a broken marriage, but if I were looking for an excuse than it sounds like it would be totally acceptable.

    • by mentil ( 1748130 ) on Wednesday May 29, 2019 @11:16PM (#58676882)

      Indeed. Porn actors could just affix a sticker to their bodies, and then the facial-recognition algorithm would identify them as a walrus.

      On the upside, walrus porn would finally get the recognition it deserves.

    • by Tom ( 822 ) on Wednesday May 29, 2019 @11:37PM (#58676966) Homepage Journal

      among 200,000 people that means 4,000 wrongly broken marriages

      You are assuming that everyone would break their marriage over something like that. I have a slightly higher opinion of mankind. There would be a considerable percentage that understands the concept of false positives and trusts the word of their spouses more than a random algorithm from a random stranger on the Internet. There would also be a considerable percentage who accepts their spouses past, whatever it includes.

      This might well cause thousands of interesting discussions and most likely a bunch of broken marriages, but those were already damaged by mistrust and hiding. In a good marriage, I'd assume you would know.

      • by Anonymous Coward on Thursday May 30, 2019 @12:21AM (#58677120)

        And I would hope that there's a considerable percentage who would say, "You did porn? Awesome! Let's watch it!"-- you know like actual sexually healthy people.

      • So people with some understanding of statistics have a higher chance of not breaking up their marriage and producing more offspring? Darwin would be happy.
    • by mamba-mamba ( 445365 ) on Thursday May 30, 2019 @12:10AM (#58677076)

      But the larger issue is the false positives. Even if the algorithms were 99% correct (which is unlikely), among 200,000 people that means 4,000 wrongly broken marriages. That is not acceptable.

      First of all, 1% of 200,000 is 2000, not 4000.

      Second of all, not all false positives are going to lead to a break-up. I mean, most people will never even check to see if their spouse is in a porn film, and if they do, they will probably not assume the AI is correct, but rather will watch the film to see for themselves. Presumably most spouses will be able to tell if it is really their spouse when they watch the film.

      When all is said and done, my estimate is that the number of marriages broken up due to AI errors is probably close to zero.

      • by Kjella ( 173770 )

        I mean, most people will never even check to see if their spouse is in a porn film, and if they do, they will probably not assume the AI is correct, but rather will watch the film to see for themselves. Presumably most spouses will be able to tell if it is really their spouse when they watch the film.

        This. It's one thing to do a match on face detection, but as a spouse you'll have intimate knowledge of their whole body while they presumably haven't got many bikini photos and hasn't tried to use them in any way. Even then the nipples/genitals are also parts with huge individual variation, it's also normal to have 10-40 moles by adulthood so even identical twins are not perfect body doubles. You can look at the whole ruckus around celebrity nudes, most of the fakes are written off as fake with enough exam

    • by joe_frisch ( 1366229 ) on Thursday May 30, 2019 @01:56AM (#58677400)

      The ability to process and correlate large amounts of "public" data results in effects that may not be obvious to everyone. For example, in the past anyone could see me in my car on a street based on the license plate. That is different from someone building and selling a database that records all of my motions.

      In this case many people may have done porn with the assumption of modest anonymity - taking some risk that someone they know would recognize them. That is different from a world where it becomes possible to quickly determine whether any particular person has done porn.

      • by AmiMoJo ( 196126 )

        It's part of a wider issue with this technology. Say you went out, got drunk and someone snapped a photo a decade ago. Posted it publicly on Facebook. Today you apply for a job, the employer finds it via facial recognition and decides they will go with someone else. They probably won't even tell you why, just "sorry you didn't get it".

        It's not new either. We already have regulations for things like credit reference agencies to prevent them disclosing stuff that happened long ago and which the law seems no l

    • by idji ( 984038 )
      Why is he focusing on women and not women and men? This is misogynistic.
    • 200,000 people that means 4,000 wrongly broken marriages.

      You are assuming that:

      1. the partner would believe it ("I know her. She would never do something like that")
      2. the partner wouldn't know better ("It isn't possible. She was with me when that was filmed")
      3. the partner would be upset ("So that is where you learned to do that!")
      4. the partner wouldn't be pleased ("I married a porn star!" or "You are into women too? I never knew! Can we have a threesome? We can?!? YES!!!!")
      5. the partner didn't already know
  • by SuperKendall ( 25149 ) on Wednesday May 29, 2019 @10:56PM (#58676786)

    Things like this quickly constructed database by amateurs make it inevitable that you'll see a new rise of porn with AI face detection camouflage [cvdazzle.com] on all the actors.

    Not you'l probably want to apply similar techniques to all body areas that might be as unique as a face... HD is pretty HD now.

  • by mentil ( 1748130 ) on Wednesday May 29, 2019 @11:09PM (#58676858)

    If some rando in China could hack this together, it's a safe bet that several organizations and agencies have had this capability for a while.

    Likely scenario: young woman wants to apply to be a teacher at a gradeschool, and the hiring manager does a background check online with a 3rd-party corporation, and ticks the 'porno search' box. The kids have gotten a kick from pointing their smartphone's camera at their teachers while running a 'porno search' app, seeing if any hits come up, for shits and giggles. So this has to be done preemptively at the hiring stage. Doesn't matter if you're a male or female teacher, or what one thinks of bodily autonomy, it's a matter of "do you want your students to find videos of you fucking?"
    There will be court cases deciding the line between public shaming and harassment (including sexual harassment) of porn actors, and discrimination in careers outside education (I guarantee 'think of the children' will steamroll all other arguments in that instance).

    Despite the popularity of Pornhub, society has pretty much relied on there being so many people and so much porn that it's unlikely that someone you know would stumble across a porn video/pic with you in it. Once the "tree hiding in a forest" approach no longer works, then things might get interesting. E.g. geotagging of porn so that people nearby (i.e. people you might know) WON'T see it. Or, people 'coming out' about being in porno, and trying to make it more socially respectable, rather than keeping it a secret. Or it might just be hugely embarrassing until the anti-porn crusaders die out. Or there'll be a sudden push for a 'right to be forgotten' in the USA.

    • by wherrera ( 235520 ) on Wednesday May 29, 2019 @11:38PM (#58676974) Journal
      The REAL problem: same teacher applicant scenario, but the software search finds -- and reports as real -- a deepfake planted by, say, a bitter ex-boyfriend, or even another applicant for the job.
      • I suppose a sufficiently motivated person could poison the well... trawl social media for the face pics and then deepfake it onto salacious media, upload that somewhere, and now *everyone* has a false positive.
    • by ChoGGi ( 522069 )

      "do you want your students to find videos of you fucking?"
      Do you teach sex ed?

    • Or it might just be hugely embarrassing until the anti-porn crusaders die out.

      However you personally feel about it, that's funny.

      Everyone likes to think that their own views are a one way ratchet for society. (Because of course, in time everyone will realize that I'm right, lol.)

      Whole civilizations rise and fall, not just your personal little set of sexual mores. The Great Awakening (for example) was almost two millennia after the orgies of ancient Rome.

      You think that your views are ascendant, and for the moment I suppose they are (though not in your favored imported culture/rel

  • by HiThere ( 15173 ) <[ten.knilhtrae] [ta] [nsxihselrahc]> on Wednesday May 29, 2019 @11:10PM (#58676860)

    Porn is why he developed it (and his CYA is not believable), but that's NOT the point.

    The point is that a random photo of you (or someone similar enough to you) can be identified with you without any additional information just from "public information".

    That's bad enough, but adversarial networks can take this kind of thing and generate undetectable fakes. Right now that's a major effort, but this shows that next year it's likely to be easy. Possibly the year after next.

    So get ready for pictures of the president being humped and pissed on by a camel. And you'll have only your sense of whether he would do that or not to decide whether it's true. Considering what rumor has always done to people, and how convincing even blatantly fraudulent pictures are (You can *see* the string in that flying saucer photo!), I don't look forwards to it. We haven't seen the *start* of fake news yet.

    • by mentil ( 1748130 )

      Many people have dedicated/thrown away their lives as a result of words on paper. Fake photos couldn't possibly do any worse (or in greater numbers).

      Countless people have been damned due to false words on paper.

    • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

      by Tom ( 822 )

      And you'll have only your sense of whether he would do that or not to decide whether it's true.

      But the current developments are moving the goal posts.

      It used to be that a picture or video is good evidence, because while we knew that you can fake them, the effort to make a good fake was quite a bit and the safe default assumption was "it is probably real unless I have evidence to believe the contrary".

      Now with faking becoming so easy that anyone can do it, the default assumption should shift to "it is probably fake unless I have evidence to the contrary".

      • by AmiMoJo ( 196126 )

        The bar isn't quite that low though, because the fakes require source images. So often you can just do a reverse image search to find the original and prove that the fake is fake.

        To be really effective it would need someone to create an original image to use as the base of the fake. Not all that easy as it would need to be believable - setting, the body of the actor portraying the person being faked etc. And the more it gets photoshopped the more it becomes obvious that it's been edited.

        As you say, people w

    • "but this shows that next year it's likely to be easy."
       
      What? That makes no sense. How would this "make it easy" to generate fakes? This is just image classification.

  • by quenda ( 644621 ) on Wednesday May 29, 2019 @11:11PM (#58676864)

    That has to be a vanishingly small overlap.
    No offence intended if that was your double major.

  • by Impy the Impiuos Imp ( 442658 ) on Wednesday May 29, 2019 @11:17PM (#58676890) Journal

    Didn't someone categorize there are only 266 human faces or so, and everyone is just a slightly distorted version of one of them?

    There has to be something like this going on inside facial recognition.

  • feminists cryout (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Tom ( 822 ) on Wednesday May 29, 2019 @11:27PM (#58676930) Homepage Journal

    the use of machine learning to control and extort women's bodily autonomy demonstrates deep misogyny

    Uh, no?

    The women in question - even assuming that this algorithm works reliably - either had full use of their bodily autonomy when they decided to make some porn, or were controlled and extortet at that point.

    It is true that a previous porn career is still a hindrance in many parts of our still primitive world, where for some reason we think that something is lost to a person if they "gave themselves" to someone else, all of which is total nonsense in any way including semantical. But there we are and that's how our monkey brains work. No, actually, most monkeys are smarter than that, if you look at how they deal with sex.

    But this feminist outcry is barking up the wrong tree. Instead this should be used as a proud statement. Make a #YesIdidPorn hashtag. Run a campaign to lift the bullshit shaming from it. But you can't, because feminists can't decide whether they support porn as the free expression of a womans sex and career choice and she can decide what she wants to do with her body - or condemn it as patriarchial oppression and exploitation of sexist male chauvinist abuse of the female form.

    I'm sure someone will comment what I'd say if my wife would be identified in a porn video. Here's what I'd say: I stand by my wife because that's what marriage is, and if it turns out she did porn, I'd want to see all of it because I don't support any shaming for something that should be pleasurable and I want to know everything about her.

    This is still the old church mantra - if you control their sex life, you control them.

    ---

    The privacy questions this app opens up are interesting, but not new. You already have a risk of people recognizing you if you participated in porn - or any other videotaped activity, for that matter. It's just that comparison at scale wasn't possible yet, because even if someone tried there's just too much porn in existence and nobody could watch it all (my guess is that more than 24 hours of new porn are created every day).

    This genie left the bottle a long time ago and I'm quite sure this is not the only person who had this idea, only the first to publish it. The genie will not be stuffed back into the bottle. If you've kept your porn career from your husband this far, it might be time to admit it. And it might be time to finally remove that sticker of shame. Especially given that a lot of the people who are the most outraged about porn are its main catalyzers. Case in point: When they introduces study fees in Germany (which used to have free university education for every citizen), a few especially witty journalists wrote that the move was probably prompted by a desire of the old men responsible to get a fresh supply of young women desperate for money.

    We should shame the people who shame women for being sexual beings. Not the other way around.

    • by Mashiki ( 184564 )

      Hate to break it to you, modern feminists are puritans. The ones who'd line up first to attack women on this would be other women. It would be right in line with the most harassment that a woman receives if from other women that everyone gets shifty eyes and looks away from.

    • by ChoGGi ( 522069 )

      We should shame the people who shame people for being sexual beings. Not the other way around.

      Fixed that for you, unless you think men should be shamed?

    • by AmiMoJo ( 196126 )

      The issue is that the deal is changing and they have no say in it.

      Used to be the case that if you made porn it was in a seedy theatre or on VHS for a while and then gone, with the chance of you being recognized years late being extremely small unless you happened to be a big star who made many movies, and even then due to ageing and changing your appearance...

      Then the internet came along and anything digital became pretty much eternal. At first it was only via P2P networks, but then streaming porn sites mad

      • The issue is that the deal is changing and they have no say in it.

        Bullshit. They had a say - perform sex for money or don't perform sex for money - and they chose. If you're going to perform sex for money you don't get to complain that people judge you.

        • by AmiMoJo ( 196126 )

          Back then it would have been "make a VHS or DVD for money", knowing it wouldn't be current for very long and quickly go out of print. Or maybe do one scene for one site one time, one of hundreds, and then fade into obscurity.

          Of course they used a fake name too.

          It definitely wasn't "be a face match search away from your real name and social media accounts for eternity".

      • No, the deal didn't change.

        There was always a chance the woman's identity would become known because she agreed to be filmed having sex for the expressed purpose of public exhibition. Not a single one of the women in question were making porn when porn was only "n a seedy theatre[sic] or on VHS for a while and then gone". It is 2019. that means a woman born in 2001 is old enough to do porn. None of the women in question can remember a time when porn wasn't readily available on the internet.

  • Hey women of Twitter: Just like you're always saying "freedom of speech isn't freedom from consequences", in the same way freedom to slut around doesn't mean freedom from consequences.
    • Huh. You'd almost think that 'women' isn't a homogenous group and that there are multiple people with different opinions in it.

  • Accountability (Score:4, Insightful)

    by MrKaos ( 858439 ) on Thursday May 30, 2019 @02:00AM (#58677408) Journal

    All too often watching porn is used to shame men, so what I see here is the scenario being flipped to shame the women making porn which exposes them to accountability for their actions the same way men are.

    Of course *anything* that makes women accountable for their actions is to be objected to by feminists:

    This is horrendous and a pitch-perfect example of how these systems, globally, enable male dominance.

    The only pitch is the shrill fear of the *possibility* of being accountable. As usual there is nothing in her statement of how men are exploitable by the very same technology indicating a clear lack of ethical parity. Not the possibility of *state dominance* but *male dominance* indicating a complete disconnect from how such technology would be employed and a complete lack of concern for the public good.

    Surveillance, impersonation, extortion, misinformation all happen to women first and then move to the public sphere, where, once men are affected, it starts to get attention.

    Feminists, the masters flipping a situation around. Historically it has been *men* who fight for human rights issues, even womens rights issues. As someone who has fought against surveillance technology for over 20 years it is a very rare thing to see women, en masse, fighting for any right that doesn't benefit themselves. Generally it is women who occupy the public sphere as consumers while men groan silently under the weight placed upon them to provide.

    It is men who are surveilled, it is men who are jailed, it is men who are tortured and killed for protesting state power.

    The only white privilege that exists is white female privilege and the right being fought for is to film themselves performing sex acts for money and not be accountable in any way shape or form.

  • to every security camera on the planet [spyculture.com].
    The problem with surveillance in the 1984 novel was that someone *might* be watching anytime anywhere, but it had scaleability problems. But computer power is scaleable and so are datasets. We (and of course also 'they') will be able to watch everyone everywhere and crosslink with everything. At first that'll be mostly a sales pitch and projects will drown in false positives. Mostly. number plate recognition works pretty well now for instance.

    There is a big difference

  • "the use of machine learning to control and extort women's bodily autonomy demonstrates deep misogyny"

    Say what? If someone puts up a porn video with their face visible, they are clearly ok with being recognized. Recognizing them, with or without the help of machine learning, is hardly an assault on their "bodily autonomy". The women are the ones who starred in the video and allowed it to be published. (Nonconsensual pornography, i.e., posting videos without permission, is criminal.)

    Of course, doxxing these

  • This could relaunch Facebook - which guys would NOT use this to scan their old school? Er, I mean, this sounds horribly invasive and definitely not something we would want available! On a serious note though, wait until scanning starts picking up people at political rallies or other places that might raise an employer's eyebrows.
  • If the deep-fakes can fool the recognition program, then what?

    It seems like we'd be almost back to square 1, with plausible deniability for everybody.

  • This is the solution.
    Once they get online they can be used as long as it is possible to access them freely. Like with you favorite search engine.
    If you can access without signing any EULA then you are done. On whatever side you stand.

  • Lots of hysteria here, as usual with contemporary hashtag & genderstudies pseudo-feminism.

    Three years from now anyone can take the face of anyone and attach it to any kind of body doing any kind of sex in a video on some free online service and it will look real. Who effing cares? And if you've done porn, having people notice you for that should be the least of your concerns, otherwise you've picked the wrong profession. As with girls/ladies/guys/men dropping out of porn - no big deal, seriously. So I c

    • That is the better solution to the issue; shame is a strong social motivator, but I can't see how the lack of privacy we'll continue to face can do anything but erode its power.
  • This may be one positive thing about deep fakes. Once its easy to attach different faces to porn stars, the search results will no longer be interesting. All they will show is that someone somewhere attached this person's face to a porn video and posted it.

  • by sabbede ( 2678435 ) on Thursday May 30, 2019 @07:16AM (#58678308)
    Misogyny is hate for women. Recognizing a person is not hating them. It certainly is not control or extortion even if it can be used to extort someone recognized doing something they don't want others to know about. Of course, that falls apart if people simply take responsibility for their actions.

    And that's what the "experts in feminist studies" are pushing - that people not have to bear responsibility for their actions. If you were naked on camera, that was your choice (assuming they knew, otherwise it's a different issue), and you have to live with it. You can't claim to be a victim when you are responsible for putting yourself in that situation. If you put videos of yourself on the internet having sex, at no point should the possibility of being recognized not have been on your mind. You knew what could happen, you did it anyway, now you have to live with it. No amount of word-salad from radical academics can change that.

  • by bill_mcgonigle ( 4333 ) * on Thursday May 30, 2019 @07:17AM (#58678310) Homepage Journal

    Ladies - don't marry this guy - he's an asshole who tries to control people.

    Also, does this mean teen boys can plug in a photo of the girl next door and get near matches? Because that's a business opportunity.

  • by argStyopa ( 232550 ) on Thursday May 30, 2019 @10:02AM (#58679374) Journal

    If a person (not just a woman) is honest with their partner (or their employer) about their past, then this literally can't do any harm.

    And if a person, say, does porn and DOESN'T tell their significant other about it - who, precisely, is the one being 'judgy' about being in porn then?

    What I think has people in an uproar is that they THOUGHT they could hide their actions, and are now afraid they cannot. But look carefully at that: THEY'RE the ones carrying the shame about their past.

    If a middle-school teacher goes to get a job and is upfront about 'yeah I spent a couple years in my 20s doing porn' understand that may impact the hiring decision. I know all the desperately enlightened people here (mostly without children) will insist that shouldn't have any impact, but it will because it's a potentially major distraction to learning.

    In short: if you were intending on lying (deliberately or by omission) then THAT's what's in jeopardy here, this has nothing to do with 'oppressing' people.

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