Thread by @jonst0kes

This is the level of sophistry that most AI ethics discourse operates at. To unpack this: they argue that basic facial recognition tech of the kind that unlocks your iPhone is an example of "physiognomic AI" because it infers "are these pixels a face or not?" & extrapolates depth

If you're thinking that surely the cannot be arguing that basic iPhone unlocking tech is an example of "physiognomy" that should be banned by law, behold:

The stuff in this paper isn't just farce tho -- it's also tragedy. There are actual, honest-to-God examples of physiognomic AI in the paper -- not the ridiculous FRT stuff, but actual "let us measure the skull to determine criminality" type stuff. But the sophistry...

...& overreach of much of the work gives researchers a license to tune that stuff out. This comes up again & again in AI ethics -- there are real harms brought to light, but also a bunch of fake Very Online "Harms" (e.g. this language model doesn't know some women produce sperm!)

So any sane person, or someone who's trying to get actual work done, will stop reading at the point where the paper or twitter thread etc. has gone off the rails into status- and attention-seeking wokescolding, & not get to the part where the algo literally killed people.

Computer vision is an important field that matters a lot. The potential for real harm (of the "we accidentally killed some people with this busted AI") is very high in automotive, military, medicine, etc. It's also a very promising field w/ much potential for good.

There should be healthier norms & incentives in place to encourage pointing out actual dangers & to discourage the kind of catastrophizing & grandstanding that's in this paper. It matters. But there aren't, so we can't have nice things.

I've written more about these kinds of "phrenology" claims here: jonstokes.com/p/phrenology-i…

Somebody just sent me this bit of anti-computer-vision gold: journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.11…

Brethrxn, is sinful to look for neural structures that do fixed image recognition tasks. This goes against the teachings of the church. Burn this Fei-Fei heretic person!