We all know the history of black slavery. People brought from Africa to do the filthy jobs of white slave owners. Initially brought as cotton pickers, these slaves accepted the US as their own country as moved towards liberating themselves from their current status and was brought to halt after it was declared illegal to have slaves in 1865. But the color and culture have only brought complex problems to their successors. Racism is a mental and societal disease that has been oppressing the black until the latest death of George Floyd through suffocation in the public. This stirred up a movement called the Black Lives Matter movement. Though the protestors are completely in this, they wish to protect themselves from being arrested for false charges, especially the black.
Every participant in the protest has a high chance of their photos being captured and uploaded on social media which later can be sent to the facial recognition database for the police to track them down. Computer technicians have tried to tackle this problem by blurring and pixelating the image, but still advanced facial recognition systems can normalize the picture to identify the persons.
The researchers at Stanford Machine Learning decided to develop an AI bot programmed to detect faces rather than recognize faces. Once the faces are detected, it covers the faces with a BLM fist emoji. All the user must do is upload an image tagging @BLMPrivacyBot on Twitter. This bot was tested on an image with 1.2 million faces and was able to cover them all with the first emoji. In this way, the privacy and security of the protestors can be protected from law enforcement. You can try and upload an image on twitter tagging the bot account. It will be passed on to an AI model in the cloud, which slaps an emoji to all the faces in the image and then sends the anonymized photo back to you.
However, this AI does possess certain disadvantages. The developers themselves indicated the bot isn’t complete perfection. Their tweet quotes “Blocking out the face offers a great form of anonymization; nevertheless, this cannot be mistaken for complete foolproof anonymity, e.g. if someone is wearing a t-shirt with their SSN or if they are not anonymized in another image and identity could be triangulated through similar clothing and surroundings”. Furthermore, unless an offline app is built, users can use the online Twitter platform.
The pursuit of equality has always been in the movie, but the addition of technology to it makes it efficient and effective.
