What ancient advice can teach us about AI

Artificial intelligence (AI) is everywhere. Siri, Alexa and Google Assistant have become indispensable to millions of users. Tesla Autopilot has the potential to change driving forever. And IBM Watson took a new job providing big data solutions to businesses after his first job was on the line.

Those are just the most notable examples. Useful applications of AI are deployed in a wide spectrum of industries, but AI can also be abused.

Zenfolio, the website builder and photo sharing site, recently introduced technology that applies AI to help photographers (opens in new tab) when selecting the best photos from the thousands of shots typically taken during a photo shoot. The advanced image recognition technology is incredibly powerful and can make photographers more efficient than they ever dreamed.

In exploring the best way to roll out AI in the photography community, Zenfolio had some fascinating discussions about corporate social responsibility in general and its obligations in particular.

AI: old concept, new reality

The concept of AI was theorized centuries ago by Greek philosophers (opens in new tab)with myths about Talos and Pandora creating chaos and destruction.

Perhaps these cautionary tales about artificial creatures influence our thinking today. While the ancient Greeks would no doubt have been amused by the rudimentary nature of Zenfolio’s philosophical discourse, the company had the advantage that the discussions were based on actual implementations, not just theoretical musings (and the team wore more practical clothes, too).

Artificial intelligence contributes to efficiency, accuracy and productivity in ways the early Greeks could not have imagined. It evolved to be able to process language, optical recognitionand human interaction.

However, there are positive and negative aspects to consider when using AI responsibly.

The positive application of AI in photography

The photography industry is generating exponentially more images than ever thanks to digital cameras and the best photo editors. Photographers need to be more efficient and productive in the time-consuming process of finding the best images out of thousands.

AI can analyze large amounts of data and perform specific functions, becoming faster and more accurate as it learns, usually when refined by a human.

Since every photographer has a unique style and relies on their creative eye to characterize their work, it’s important to build a model where AI can assist with a specifically defined task, but put ultimate creative control in the hands of the photographer late.

The inherent bias of AI in photography

A major challenge with many types of artificial intelligence is bias. Especially in facial recognition technology.

Some AI models inherit bias from the datasets they are trained on, and can therefore amplify or exacerbate societal biases. This usually happens because of the lack of variety in the training set for the models.

Miscellaneous data can help mitigate issues that lead to bias in the system, but data sets still need to be filtered to avoid errors.

Personal information linked to photos

We have already seen several controversial uses of facial recognition technology. Earlier this year, a New York-based startup fine of tens of millions of dollars (opens in new tab) by European authorities for collecting billions of facial images and personal information from Facebook, LinkedIn, and other websites. Then use it to train facial recognition software to identify individuals based on facial scans.

The company justifies its actions by stating that its technology is designed to be used by law enforcement agencies in fighting crime. However, there are other companies whose websites allow anyone to upload a photo to identify the subject.

Face recognition technology is undeniably a powerful tool for photographers and their clients to easily group and view photos of a specific person. It is one of the best features in the Google Photos app, for example.

However, it is not necessary for a company to associate personally identifiable information (PII) with the image to achieve these results.

For photo shoots that generate thousands of images, with a range of similar subjects appearing in many of the photos, applying facial recognition to find a specific person does not require the application to know anything about that person other than their unique facial features.

Once all of a person’s photos have been selected by the AI, it can rate each image based on a series of criteria ranked by importance, for example the sharpest image, the happiest faces, whether the eyes are open or closed.

By saving the first set of photos locally to a photographer’s computerthe technology can be applied in extremely useful ways, without putting the subject in the photo at risk of AI models learning to more accurately identify them from a large group of private images.

For example, if the photographer then shares a subset of the best photos with their client through the Zenfolio cloud storage services, the gallery is password protected and advanced settings for the photographer to enable or disable facial recognition features for each client’s gallery.

Using AI with intelligence

Providing professional photographers with affordable access to advanced AI is a very new initiative.

And the team behind PhotoRefine.ai has been careful and thoughtful, and perhaps even philosophical, in implementing the solution.

Using cutting edge technology, drawing on nearly two decades of experience in securing images and video, and partnering with the best security technology providers.

There is always the possibility that circumstances will develop in unexpected ways, but the approach the company has taken is to ensure that it does not enable or contribute to negative applications of AI technology.

Perhaps the ancient Greek philosophers would be surprised that their Talos drive a Tesla today. Or that the chaos and destruction they feared from Pandora is limited to the music industry. If all companies spend time thinking about the moral and ethical impact of their creations – tunics and sandals optional – we may be able to prove those old concerns are unfounded.

But as the more contemporary philosopher Douglas Adams said, “A common mistake people make when trying to design something completely foolproof is to underestimate the ingenuity of complete fools.”