Tech with a Conscience
by Miki SaxonSounds like an oxymoron.
The world knows about tech’s love affair with, and misuse of, personal data. The continual ignoring, minimizing and excusing of hate speech, revenge porn, fake news, bullying, etc.
Then there is its totally irrational attitude/belief that people will be kind and good to each other online no matter what they are like in the real world.
Given the prevailing attitude, would a hot tech startup have a conscience?
So would a founder, a self-described “technology enthusiast,” create an AI app that went viral and then shut it down because of the way it was being used?
DeepNude was built on Pix2Pix, an open-source algorithm used for “image-to-image translation.” the app can create a naked image from any picture of a woman with just a couple of clicks. Revenge porn activists said the app was “absolutely terrifying.”
As to the above question, the answer is “yes.”
The DeepNude team was horrified, believing “the probability that people will misuse it is too high.”
“We don’t want to make money this way. Surely some copies of DeepNude will be shared on the web, but we don’t want to be the ones who sell it,” DeepNude wrote in a tweet. “The world is not yet ready for DeepNude.”
—deepnudeapp (@deepnudeapp) June 27, 2019
Pix2Pix was developed by a team of scientists, who now believe the industry needs to do better and not just release their work to the world at large.
“We have seen some wonderful uses of our work, by doctors, artists, cartographers, musicians, and more,” the MIT professor Phillip Isola, who helped create Pix2Pix, told Business Insider in an email. “We as a scientific community should engage in serious discussion on how best to move our field forward while putting reasonable safeguards in place to better ensure that we can benefit from the positive use-cases while mitigating abuse.”
One can only hope that the scientific community does, indeed, find a way to do good while avoiding the worst of the negative fallout from discoveries.
And hats off to the DeepNude team.
It’s really inspiring to see such a concrete example of doing the right thing, with no shilly-shallying or dancing around the decision.
But I do wonder what would have happened if either the developers or the scientists were beholden to investors.
Image credit: deepnudeapp via Twitter