While Google agonizes over military AI, IBM is happy to pick up the slack, even for the Chinese military

IBM shared its controversial Diversity in Faces dataset, used to train facial recognition systems, with companies and universities directly linked to militaries and law enforcement across the world. The dataset contains information scraped from a million images posted on Flickr, a popular image sharing website, under the …

[Cameron Colley]

IBM, helping genocide?

Never!

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: IBM, helping genocide?

History repeating itself?

"IBM shared its controversial Diversity in Faces dataset"

"It gave the Nazis a way of tracing Jews and dissidents using the powerful automated search tools using the IBM machines. It enabled them to search databases rapidly and efficiently"

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dehomag

[Yet Another Anonymous coward]

Re: IBM, helping genocide?

But that was the old IBM

The new IBM is incapable of searching internal documents on its age discrimination policy without the aid of the whistleblower.

[JohnFen]

Vindication

This is further vindication of my decision, years ago, to avoid ever putting my photo on the internet.

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: Vindication

At this rate, they will be able to get it via side channels and inference. :O

[Peter2]

Re: Vindication

That won't save you these days. Other people can post photos of you on facebook and tag you in them, and presumably GCHQ is capable of getting that data.

Failing that, one imagines that you probably have a passport or driving license with your photo in.

[Anonymous Coward]

The only thing Google is agonizing over

Is how to grab lucrative DoD contracts without the majority of its workforce finding out.

[DrBobK]

Thanks

Wow. Good for IBM. I'm interested, as an academic who studies vision, in assessing the importance of potential low-level statistical texture descriptors in object or face recognition. I've just filled in the form asking for access to the database.

People who want to do evil things with coded images will already have done it if they are really any good at doing their evil things.

[Will Godfrey]

Re: Thanks

I'm rather hoping you just forgot the /s tag.

If not I suggest you do some serious reading.

[Anonymous South African Coward]

The rise of Dehomag?

[Anonymous Coward]

Rather rebirth... like the mythical phoenix.

[trevorde]

Bias in IBM data

It'd be full of people over 50, to be selected for RA.

[Pascal Monett]

Objectively speaking

It is not IBM's fault that there is a country out there that does not care about human rights. Science should be open and public, and IBM is doing the right thing to help Science progress. The fact that China is going to use that to improve its stranglehold on its people is not something IBM can do anything about, and equating this with Google is wrong because Google was specifically working on a project for China. Google was going to get paid to increase a population's misery.

Not at all the same thing.

[doublelayer]

Re: Objectively speaking

You are correct. The two are not at all the same thing. They're just two different bad things. Science does not have some get out of consequences free card. Nobody should have a get out of consequences free card.

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: Objectively speaking

> The fact that China is going to use that to improve its stranglehold on its people is not something IBM can do anything about

The fact that the Nazi German Government used the Dehomag D11 tabulating machines to keep track of the prisoners at Auschwitz and Treblinka wasn't something that IBM could do anything about. IBM was only concerned with the progress of Science.

It makes me wonder why did IBM go to such lengths to hide the origin of the income generated by the leasing of the Dehomag machines.