There aren’t many winners when it comes to the Coronavirus, but Zoom is undoubtedly one of them. They went from nothing to being a household name. It’s therefore both depressing and inevitable to see articles like this one – ‘Zoom says it uses machine-learning to detect nudity as virtual sex parties spread‘. Obviously ensuring people can get dragged into boring business meetings all day is vital, but God forbid anyone actually uses their product for sexy fun. It’d be particularly bad to allow that when a lot of people are alone and frustrated.
Can you imagine if phone companies adopted a similar policy? There’d be a national outcry if they monitored calls and cut off cell service for anyone having an intimate conversation with a partner. Yet apparently tech startups from liberal California have pretty much the same attitude to sex as Mike Pence. Good job guys.
Of course kinky people have a secret workaround. They can combine a boring office meeting with hot femdom activity. I’d like to see the machine learning algorithm that could figure out what was going on here.
This is the amazing Mistress T shooting for The English Mansion. I found the image this post from Mistress Sidonia.
Yes indeed. We have another secret workaround, actually, in that much of what turns some of us on has absolutely nothing to do with nudity and everything to do with fully-clothed adults behaving despicably to one another, physically and mentally.
I have a Tumblr blog that just reposts images from my main blog (set up when Google was considering banning naughtiness on Blogger). Tumblr itself now bans naughtiness, of course, and I occasionally get emails announcing proudly that they have detected adult content on my blog. Well spotted, there, Tumblr. Have a gold star for another case solved through your Holmesian skills of detection.
Our algorithmic overlords are some way off world domination yet, though, and they do seem to have a thoroughly Victorian attitude to what is acceptable: vicious floggings are fine and healthy but too much flesh (or – horrrors – open displays of affection between two members of the fairer sex!) brings them out in a fit of the vapours and they reach for the censoring pen.
Anyway, I had a look at the photos they had sent to the naughty corner when they started this policy and compiled a handy guide to what is and is not acceptable. https://contemplatingthedivine.blogspot.com/2018/12/naughty-or-nice.html?zx=b7b0adeea02334ad
Incidentally, their algorithms have obviously been doing nothing but look at porn ever since, because occasionally they upgrade themselves and consign a further batch of filthy pictures to the banned pile.
It’s odd… science fiction writers tend to think of super-intelligent AIs as emerging from deep learning programmes established to model climate or some such. But the future machine rulers of humanity are basically learning how to achieve consciousness by watching porn: sitting in front of their computers looking at an endless stream of degrading and commercially sexualised images, trousers around their ankles and typing with one hand. That’s the kind of personality we will have ruling the world.
And we all know how awful those guys can be, right?
I suspect detecting pornography will be the final frontier of machine learning. Even when computers ahve become sentient, conquered the world and started dispatching robots to kill John Connor, they’ll still be unclear on exactly what pornography is. As you suggest, kink is particularly challenging because it’s all about context. Computers are slowly getting better at recognizing specific things in a photograph – like naked people – but they still have no idea about the context and relationships of things within that same image.
Your post on what’s acceptable is both funny and a pretty good case in point. Everything banned looked a bit like conventional porn-y glamour shots (women, exposed flesh), where the other images were a lot harder to describe. There probably aren’t a lot of shots of testicles in a humbler being tortured by a high heel in their training data.
Thanks for stopping by!
-paltego
I don’t know why anyone would want to use a communications service run by a company runs everything you say and do in front of a camera is analyzed by deep learning systems. It’s not just to detect nudity — they’re also using what you say to target ads.
I agree, but sadly when it comes to privacy versus convenience it seems that the vast majority of people will always take convenience. Google and Facebook have built their business on that fact, and they were ranked the 4th and 5th biggest companies in the world in 2019 (by market cap). Everyone always assumes it won’t matter to them – until it does.
-paltego