Michael Lyons (Ritsumeikan University) has posted Excavating “Excavating AI”: The Elephant in the Gallery on SSRN. Here is the abstract:
Two art exhibitions, “Training Humans” and “Making Faces,” and the accompanying essay “Excavating AI: The politics of images in machine learning training sets” by Kate Crawford and Trevor Paglen, are making a substantial impact on discourse taking place in the social and mass media networks, and some scholarly circles. Critical scrutiny reveals, however, a self-contradictory stance regarding informed consent for the use of facial images, as well as serious flaws in their critique of ML training sets. Our analysis underlines the non-negotiability of informed consent when using human data in artistic and other contexts, and clarifies issues relating to the description of ML training sets.