Sterilizing anything that looks like porn with algorithms

brucesterling:

*Maybe if you had some really awesomely educated algorithms.  Like, you know the kind that learn to play chess in four days.  But to segregate the porn by the way the pixels look on the page, how would that work?  “To the unclean mind, nothing can be clean.”  In the Victorian era people used to freak out over naked piano legs.

https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2018/12/tumblrs-porn-ban-is-going-about-as-badly-as-expected/

In the run up to its total ban on pornography, Tumblr is using “algorithms” to determine if current posts are pornographic at all.

For some reason, the blogging site hopes that people running porn blogs will, after the December 17th ban, continue to use the site, but restrict their postings to the non-pornographic. As such, it isn’t just banning or closing blogs that are currently used for porn; instead, it’s analyzing each image and marking those it deems to be pornographic as “explicit.” The display of explicit content will be suppressed, leaving behind a wasteland of effectively empty porn blogs.

This would be bad enough for Tumblr users if it were being done effectively, but naturally, it isn’t. No doubt using the wonderful power of machine learning —a thing companies often do to distance themselves from any responsibility for the actions taken by their algorithms—Tumblr is flagging non-adult content as adult content, and vice versa. Twitter is filling with complaints about the poor job the algorithm is doing….

They could have done it so differently, and so much better. I, for one, had been diligently blocking porn bots as soon as they interacted with me, and I’m sure so did thousands of others. Using those data points that were free for taking, enlisting users to help identify the bad actors, and yes, combined with imperfect deep learning algorithms, would have preempted so much flak they are getting now.

Spent most of the todays Waters conference in the booth, but saw a few presentations at lunch, too. Almost everyone is bragging how many jobs their AI will displace in the next 10 years.
One French guy actually used the word “liberate”.