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IBM no longer offers general purpose facial recognition or analysis software
- DuskStar 6y agoThis reads like "we're behind, not catching up, not making money, and really need an excuse to drop this" to me, but I might just be too cynical.
- hindsightbias 6y agoGinni dropped this last year, revamped products cleansed now.
- mc32 6y agoEven more cynical: they’re not _actually_ dropping it from development—they hope players at the fore are pressured to drop it and they can swoop in saying they’ve fixed all the issues that affected others. Surprise!
- vmception 6y agoI could relate to that, I'm the type of CEO that wants to party in Ibiza with gogo dancers on my story, but wants to keep a welcoming and inclusive work environment so would be looking for any of the thinnest controversies to resign and disappear with my golden handcuffs and consolidated shareholdings. So far nobody has dug up all the little nuggets I've left in public records. Sucks
- coderintherye 6y agoI will say that 3 years ago when we tested all the major vendors' image recognition technology, they all failed spectacularly. And this wasn't some small project, we ran tens of thousands of our images through (out of over a million) and worked with several Phd students in our efforts. A picture with a white college kid in the frame would get the output of "human". Put an African borrower in the frame and you got at best a failure to recognize a human, and at worst a reference to an animal. I would hope the situation is much better now, but the bias (and just sheer inaccuracy) of the tools was readily apparent and we gave up on image recognition for the time being.
- formercoder 6y agoThere are real technical challenges here. Lighter skin has more contrast between light and dark.
- gugagore 6y agoWorth noting that sometimes technical challenges may arise because of the way technology was designed as opposed to being inherently challenging https://www.npr.org/2014/11/13/363517842/for-decades-kodak-s-shirley-cards-set-photography-s-skin-tone-standard https://www.npr.org/2014/11/13/363517842/for-decades-kodak-s... but, yes, dark skin reflects less light than light skin. by definition.
- ponker 6y agoBut the fact that the technology is considered viable given this failure mode is what reflects the bias. If a vendor has tech that can only distinguish white faces it will sell it as “detect your best customers and offer them special deals when they enter your store.” If the tech can only recognize black faces it will be sold as “recognize known criminals in the neighborhood and alert police when they enter your store.”
- nostromo 6y agoI'd like to know what cartoon villain tech company you're referring to...
- centimeter 6y agoWhite people also have higher facial variance in general. I vaguely remember in university we had an assignment to generate “eigenfaces” or something and if you partitioned the faces by race the output of the SVD would be much wider for white people. This isn’t especially surprising when you consider the fact that white people have more light/dark contrast, more hair colors, more eye colors, etc. I think a lot of the “bias” complaints levied against algorithms like this are not bias at all, but just humans who are unhappy the world doesn’t quite live up to their idealized model.
- umvi 6y agoNever let a good crisis go to waste. A few months back, covid-19 was the perfect scapegoat for a lot of companies to drop projects (or go bankrupt, cough OneWeb).
- Frost1x 6y ago>...but I might just be too cynical. This was exactly my translation of the statement. When analyzing large business decisions, I find the most success when viewing through cynicism. Self-interest is after all the primary driver of most businesses.
- hkai 6y agoBoth things can be true at the same time. IBM is looking for a nice excuse and also with facial recognition people won't get away with minor crime when cops are not looking. If every person who breaks into a car or sells something in the street is caught, this would be an insane surge in the prison population.
- lotsofpulp 6y agoPresumably, the higher likelihood of prison time would then deter people from crimes that previously had a positive expected value.
- legostormtroopr 6y ago> If every person who breaks into a car or sells something in the street is caught, this would be an insane surge in the prison population. Isn't this a good thing? Breaking into peoples cars is wrong, we want to prevent people from doing this.
- hkai 6y agoApparently it's a bad thing, since California virtually legalized car break-ins (it's not a felony, so it's not really investigated). Would you rather lose your car window or would you rather sacrifice someone's life?
- silly-silly 6y agoHonestly, I'm fine with 'someones life', because its not 'someones life'. You're exaggerating the argument. Stop trying to justify social degeneration as acceptable.
- xyzzyz 6y agoI'm fine with "sacrificing" a few years of life of people who decided to smash my car's windows, yes.
- bsenftner 6y agoDon't rule out a 3rd factor: in the facial recognition industry it is difficult to earn a profit. In general a FR client already has an existing camera network they want to add FR - meaning the quality control over the image quality is already gone. They also already have a security video management system, so whatever FR solution IBM proposes has to interoperate with that other pre-existing video management software. So right there, two traditional sources of major profit are already occupied, and in order to play in this industry one's FR software needs to be able to work with any pre-existing camera network(s) as well as interoperate with any pre-existing video surveillance software... setting all that up is not cheap and the customer is often low-tech and expecting magic...
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- Voloskaya 6y agoOn the other hand, the more ethical companies will be the ones moving the slowest in that field, since there is a lot of work needed to make this technology safe, and they would also make less money since they would have to refuse some customers. Not saying that this is what happened at IBM though.
- baddox 6y agoThat view is extremely popular for essentially every action made by any well-known company or individual. Personally, in cases where there isn’t a specific explanation for why a particular decision has secretive motivations, I do find it a touch too cynical.
- unishark 6y agoWell the alternative would be that they have chosen to take a moral stand that they expect will cost themselves and their investors money. So the explanation is pretty basic for disbelieving that story.
- baddox 6y agoWhy is that the only alternative? Couldn’t the consequences of this particular action in fact be a good financial decision due to negative feelings toward face detection software held by some portion of IBM’s potential customers or the general public?
- unishark 6y agoI suppose so. But isn't that view a cynical one also? It's not a moral stand if it's to your benefit.
- baddox 6y agoI don’t understand why it would be a problem if making a moral choice is also advantageous for other reasons. In fact, surely we should strive to arrange society in such a manner that these things align.
- unishark 6y agoBut we don't have such a society today. So there's a distinction between those making a sacrifice and those that are not.
- catalogia 6y agoI share your cynicism, but I think it's worth examining if IBM's cynical cop-out might also be true. Is it possible to develop facial recognition systems that couldn't be used for mass surveillance? Or, is it possible to develop mass surveillance systems that could only be used in the pursuit of moral (or at least morally neutral) goals? I'm generally of the opinion that tools are intrinsically amoral; neither moral nor immoral. A hammer could be used to build an orphanage, or be used to hit orphans; it's an amoral tool that could be used for good or evil. But I think when tools become sufficiently powerful, that sort of perspective starts to break down. Weapons of mass destruction are good examples of this from the past century. Could there conceivably exist digital systems too powerful to consider morally neutral? Personally I think so, and I think facial recognition technology might qualify.
- baddox 6y agoAnd it would be worthy of public outrage if a tool manufacturer were supplying hammers to child abusers for the purpose of child abuse. The fact that hammers can also be used to construct buildings is completely irrelevant. This entire “tools are amoral” argument seems to deny the fact that in most cases we don’t need to judge the intrinsic morality of a particular tool, because we can just look at how the tool is actually being used.
- apengwin 6y agoIt's like Don Draper's Why I'm Quitting Tobacco letter in the Times.
- tootie 6y agoThey may be 5th in the cloud race, but the market is huge. I'll bet they're earning far more than you'd think. They have a few very, very large clients.
- zoomablemind 6y agoThis headline reminded me of the "Chicago PD" recent episode called "False Positive" (S7E6) [1]. A new id system is pushed into a resonant case by a police chief. The system's merits are touted as being 'strongly condemned by ACLU'. Yet still in beta..., people are shown on screen as just a collection of dots. Virtual code lines that affect real lives. [1]: https://m.imdb.com/title/tt10691948/ https://m.imdb.com/title/tt10691948/
- seltzered_ 6y agoSomewhat related, there was a recent frontline documentary that delved into this: https://youtu.be/RVVfJVj5z8s?t=5000 https://youtu.be/RVVfJVj5z8s?t=5000
- microdrum 6y agoThey're just behind. And the ACLU "bias" study was thin and unscientific. Data sets and weights could have bias, but that bias can also be controlled. "Facial recognition" does not have bias.
- kgin 6y agoI understand how ml can replicate existing cultural bias in recommendation systems or risk scoring systems, but how does bias work in the context of facial recognition?
- pmorici 6y agoTrain it with a set of data that doesn't include a wide enough variety of faces.
- kgin 6y agoFor facial recognition, aren’t you just hoping for multiple images of the same person? A wide variety of faces doesn’t help you match specific people. It’s not about tagging a face as “human” it’s about tagging Bob’s face as “Bob”
- ineedasername 6y agoYeah, I think the comments here are talking about both using the same terminology without clarifying, which was a bit confusing until I realized that was happening.
- greycol 6y agoBut now explain to me the difference between Bob's face and another humans face without referencing what another humans face looks like, or the difference between bob's face in front of a white wall vs a blue sky. Basically to train an ML system you'll need pictures of bob and pictures of not bob. If the pictures of not Bob don't include any humans then there's a good chance that every human face gets classified as Bob because they look a lot more like Bob than an airplane. If the pictures of human faces are only white people and Bob is black then it's quite possible all black faces you show the system after training get classified as Bob.
- kgin 6y agoSo the problem is mostly when deciding whether a face is likely one of the faces already in the system or if it is a new face that hasn’t been added yet?
- downerending 6y agoIn other news, IBM is still in business.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- strogonoff 6y agoThe rumour of IBM dropping “all facial recognition work” is unsubstantiated, despite making its way into industry’s headlines. Krishna’s letter is here[0]. IBM will cease to sell related products and services. One might speculate they might resume sales once there are strong regulations and limitations in place. [0] https://www.ibm.com/blogs/policy/wp-content/uploads/2020/06/Letter-from-IBM.pdf https://www.ibm.com/blogs/policy/wp-content/uploads/2020/06/...
- saint-loup 6y agoQuoting from your link: >>> IBM no longer offers general purpose IBM facial recognition or analysis software. IBM firmly opposes and will not condone uses of any technology, including facial recognition technology offered by other vendors, for mass surveillance, racial profiling, violations of basic human rights and freedoms, or any purpose which is not consistent with our values and Principles of Trust and Transparency. We believe now is the time to begin a national dialogue on whether and how facial recognition technology should be employed by domestic law enforcement agencies. Even if the phrasing is limited to "general purpose" and "software", it still seems a pretty strong stance to me.
- rurban 6y agoI tend to start liking them more and more. Power as only unbackdoored modern CPU, and now this. Seems to be a big marketing push, in the right direction.
- wrkronmiller 6y ago> Power as only unbackdoored modern CPU Can you provide more details/proof?
- jedieaston 6y agoI think they are referring to it not having Intel ME or TrustZone (which is present in AMD chips and ARM chips), which could allow the processor manufacturer to run code that you don't know about. Of course, there's no Power systems for consumer use, so we're kind of stuck with Intel/AMD (until Apple releases those ARM Macs, which probably can't boot linux :( ).
- ngcc_hk 6y agoIssue real. But with one not so successful vendor out, what does it meant? Also, with china here and like many technology could you not do it china would give up as well? Is it 2016 when the coronavirus study join with a us u stop due to concerns but not by china (Wuhan lab) that give them a lead? Or human genetic HIV research on baby? No good solution but I think just quit is not the one for a potential human rights related technology research or area?
- CivBase 6y agoWhat is he referring to when he mentions "racial profiling" in the context of facial recognition? Is it just a disparity in training data?
- kube-system 6y agoMaybe it's in reference to the concern that flawed facial recognition tech can confirm the inherent biases of the person relying on the data?
- hackermang 6y agoIt is hard to get a balanced training set when certain groups commit a disproportionate amount of crimes.
- casefields 6y agoHasn't there been a bunch of goof ups with it having trouble with black faces? https://www.wired.com/story/best-algorithms-struggle-recognize-black-faces-equally/ https://www.wired.com/story/best-algorithms-struggle-recogni... Google Photos tagged blacks as gorillas: https://www.forbes.com/sites/mzhang/2015/07/01/google-photos-tags-two-african-americans-as-gorillas-through-facial-recognition-software/#3c90a334713d https://www.forbes.com/sites/mzhang/2015/07/01/google-photos... 3 years later they still hadn't solved it: https://www.theverge.com/2018/1/12/16882408/google-racist-gorillas-photo-recognition-algorithm-ai https://www.theverge.com/2018/1/12/16882408/google-racist-go...
- ngcc_hk 6y agoThis might be a strange argument but look at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23459963 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23459963 The key is to have open data and not let Chinese to have world data whilst they close their it and data for themselves. Shut down an area and let china lead is not the human right answer. You need to force them to join the world in a meaningful way. We cannot study photos or things like that like study Soviet Union politics. Just too danger to leave and let china to win. All in and ensure the technology be used in an open And censurable manner.
- thinkloop 6y ago> a product that is similarly just barely good enough to use. I thought facial recognition was advanced (mainly based on genpop articles), but isn't China using it massively with success?
- person_of_color 6y agoIn one of the most homogenous populations on Earth.
- reaperducer 6y agoisn't China using it massively Yes with success? There's no way to know.
- winrid 6y agoBased on a month in China, and having relatives there, I'd say very much yes to the second question. If they want, they can trace your whole day from start to end in a city.
- P-NP 6y agoA striking difference to what's happening in China where facial recognition software made SenseTime the world's most valuable AI unicorn: "However, facial recognition does not seem to have been making the company much money, if any. To be fair the technology is really in its infancy and there are few applications where an enterprise vendor like IBM makes sense."
- villahousut 6y agoI guess China has some money-worth applications for face recognition which luckily there isn't demand for in Western countries
- caymanjim 6y agoThere are a number of cynical comments here about how they weren't making money on the technology and are just announcing this for PR reasons. Well, maybe, but isn't that sort of cynical response even worse? I'm rabidly against the use of facial recognition on unwilling subjects, whether it's a government actor (by far the most oppressive use) or a corporate actor. I'm rabidly against public space cameras. I want to see this technology die and never return. We all love to pounce on companies for doing things we don't like. Why don't we celebrate this as the victory it is? Of course there's a PR component here. Why wouldn't they make an announcement? Why wouldn't they do it now when the audience might be more receptive to the idea? The fact that they weren't making money off it is unlikely to be the only reason they're canceling it. IBM plays the long game, and there's absolutely a market for this technology. A huge and profitable market. They could have kept at it and turned a profit. So, yeah, they're trying to make some hay, but not every corporate action is purely cynical and evil. Let's appreciate that they've made a positive change, and let's hope that it increases awareness of a horrible technology, and puts pressure on the more egregious actors like Amazon and the defense industry. We don't have to pat IBM on the back, but we can cut them some slack.
- dTal 6y agoAmen. Even if they're doing it for purely selfish reasons, it's still great that they used it as an opportunity to set an example. And I hasten to add, it's not exactly an unmitigated marketing win. It'll certainly raise some eyebrows in some circles to see IBM taking a moral stance on something.
- neximo64 6y agoIt's just software, if an actor wanted to use facial recognition they can write it themselves. Isn't the correct attack vector regulation vs having a company pull its products? If IBM isn't doing it someone else will and it'll just be less competition, meaning a better funded product for the industry winner.
- caymanjim 6y agoThe primary customers for this technology are governments. They want it. They're not going to regulate it away from themselves. At best they'll regulate the far less dangerous civil use so as to pay lip service to concerns and amplify their "think of the children" misdirection. They can't write it as quickly or as effectively themselves. Governments don't write software. They pay IBM, Amazon, and Lockheed to do it. If most vendors grow a conscience (or fear consumer retribution), then no one writes it. Or it becomes prohibitively expensive. Or it doesn't work as well (which isn't necessarily always good, but is in this case, because it will reduce public support).
- kohtatsu 6y agoHonestly if I were a POC the last thing I would want is accurate facial recognition. FaceID will work regardless thanks to depth maps. I can't see any other use of the technology benefiting me.
- PeterisP 6y agoI think the cat is out of the bag. There's enough public datasets and published methodologies that are relatively simple to implement, that quite usable facial recognition software is within the bounds of an undergraduate homework project. Sure, IBM can probably make it more accurate, but nonetheless, if somebody wants to make a tool that does e.g. ethnic profiling, then they can do it without the help of IBM, the techniques for solving similar vision tasks are known and people who can do it are widespread.
- regularfry 6y agoThe relevant difference between IBM and the undergrad is that the latter will have a hard time pitching to governments.
- PeterisP 6y agoAny interested government department where a manager wants this can hire a random graduate that can implement this for them, it could be literally be a one-man project with a trivial budget. There's no multimillion purchase pitch required, a regional niche department can do it in their own kitchen without involving the rest of the government using spare change they have to spend until the end of the fiscal year in order to not get the next year's budget reduced.
- MintelIE 6y agoOnly AFTER they helped China develop the technology to racially ID their Muslims. And IBM isn't alone, many companies have helped China to efficiently fill its death camps.
- unnouinceput 6y agoQuote: "However, facial recognition does not seem to have been making the company much money, if any." Right there it's the real reason why. Rest of IBM's blah blah is just dust in eyes.
- refurb 6y agoNever let a crisis go to waste. Why just cancel a program that's losing money when you can cancel the program and tell everyone it's because of your new found belief in social justice.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- smitty1110 6y ago"A crisis is a terrible thing to waste." - Paul Romer I dust this quote off far too often for my liking, but it fits.
- square_usual 6y agoLots of AI tech isn't making money now, but will in the future after tons of investment. IBM is over a century old, and they've invested in a lot of tech like that. I understand the impulse to be cynical about a company's motivations for any social action, but this is honestly a good thing and we should be happy about that.
- bsenftner 6y agoFacial recognition is difficult to earn a profit for several key reasons: a) FR customers tend to already have large camera networks they want to add FR, meaning the profits of selling the customer cameras and the quality control over the camera image quality is gone; b) FR customers tend so already have video surveillance management software, and expect any added FR software to interoperate as a plugin or 2nd class application to their surveillance management software; c) most/all of the cameras were never intended for FR use, but this new potential client has existing relationships for their security cameras and networking, so the FR vendor will need to work with/for this 3rd party company that already has the video surveillance management contract... Their guys operating the FR system day to day need to be trained how to install FR appropriate view cameras, understand issues such as variances of illumination, indoor and outdoor lighting, and the necessity for timed outside lights and so on. Then after all that, specialists configuring the FR system to be tuned for accuracy across all indoor and outdoor environments across all time frames of monitoring. With the logistics of each FR customer being unique, add in these other existing infrastructure hurdles, and then mix in the uncertainty of the FR system's configuration and it working with light to no technical trained staff? FR is very difficult to do successfully, and that equates to very difficult to do profitably.
- tw000001 6y agoLook. I know this is a very unpopular opinion, but it absolutely needs to be said. If we continue down this path of conflating equality of opportunity with equality of outcome, society is going to have a very bad time. The only way to progress is to acknowledge this inconvenient truth, that there is literally nothing that guarantees that all peoples would see identical outcomes given identical opportunities - and in fact everything we know about culture and human nature says otherwise. This entire protest movement is based on a fundamentally unscientific premise. You simply cannot expect anything good to come from handwaving any unequal outcomes away with "racism" or "bias". It's a disservice to everyone, especially minorities. The facial recognition software is correctly conditioning on a valid prior, because statistically speaking, blacks in the US commit more crime. By ignoring this fact and deliberately biasing your software in the opposite direction, you're only going to be hurting everyone non-black and negatively impacting society overall.
- TomMarius 6y agoWhat you're saying might be statistically correlated but that does not make it an useful discriminator. There is nothing inherent in black people that makes them commit crimes more, these are societal factors. Imagine a white person had to pay 100x the scholarship because the richest people are all white.
- tw000001 6y ago>There is nothing inherent in black people that makes them commit crimes more, these are societal factors. You fundamentally cannot prove that, but people are making policy as though it is true, at the expense of others. >Imagine a white person had to pay 100x the scholarship because the richest people are all white. That's literally what affirmative action is. Not quite 100x but the same is happening - and not just to white people. You're familiar with the recent ivy league scandals, right?
- TomMarius 6y agoActually you can prove it and it has been proven. Genetics have a minor say in who a person is, and racial factor is equivalent to statistical error. For example there are adopted black children in very white populations, e.g. in Eastern Europe, where I live. These children are absolutely no different to kids here - and the white kids here know from experience that a person that grew up here (among our people) will be just like them. And the same goes for other ethnicities/nationalities that are considered different in personality, e.g. Arabs, Greeks, Italians, Spanish people... It's all about the upbringing. I am not familiar with any scandals, and in the case of Ivy league schools I am always asking why that school? There are thousands of cheap (for everyone) high quality schools. The fact that few well known schools are using race to distinguish high income students is wrong (now you at least have some view into what racism is, imagine how bad it must be to be a minority), but it is not happening universally as you suggest.
- bparsons 6y agoGive IBM a break. It isn't as if it would have had some experience in the past suggesting that its technology could be used for monstrous ends.
- tootahe45 6y agoIBM failed to compete.