This work touches on: Artificial Intelligence and YOU
My research focuses on censorship on social media being used to remove sex workers.
This tool and tools like this one, are used to review our photos and deem them appropriate for the ever-changing terms of service on social media.
One of the questions I’ve studied is regarding nipples. Terms of service for instagram does not allow female nipples (and does allow male nipples)- but how can an AI or (a human reviewer for that matter) know what the gender of a nipple owner is- without the owner of that nipple disclosing their gender. There is actually a strategy that sex workers and femmes use to their advantage- they set their gender to “Male” and are deleted less frequently.
Social media censorship is enacted in three ways- user reported (when we see something inappropriate and flag it), there are human checkers hired by the social media companies to review disputed removals and finally there is AI censorship.
This week I would like you all to try Google’s Vision AI.
Here is the site you will use: https://cloud.google.com/vision
You can try this for free if you scroll down to “try the API” and drag a picture—preferably of yourself, but if you don’t feel comfortable use a different photo—into the designated zone.
I have screen grabbed the section of the page you must scroll to to find the drag-in zone:
You can drag and drop the photo you have chosen and click through the information the tool has generated about the image.
DON’T FORGET TO CHECK ALL THE TABS OF INFO IT GENERATES.
One thing to note is that these AI are AMAZING at catching text in a photo. This is how those COVID CDC banners are generated at the bottom of every post that even tangentially applies to COVID. Again, in my field of research, sex workers try to get around this by disrupting that reading like using “s*x w*rk” instead of sex work. This is also why some attempts at disruption like writing sex as “S3X” may not be as effective.
Write a reflection of what surprised you or didn’t surprise you about what you found,
and possible implications or inconsistencies imbedded in this tool. Please include the photos you had the tool analyze. (3 pages maximum should be enough space to complete this work, including the photo.)
