Massive Attack turns concert into facial recognition surveillance experiment
(gadgetreview.com)156 points by loteck 5 hours ago
156 points by loteck 5 hours ago
https://www.linkedin.com/in/al-landes-50018016b/
Writing for the last 14 years and for GadgetReview since 2017; Managing Editor since 2018.
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I think this assumes a very limited scope of how AI gets used for these. As if the article is a one and done output from a single prompt. I can imagine many iterative prompts combined with some copying and pasting to get an hour’s worth of copy in five minutes.
That jovial overly friendly tone is a give away. Like to thinks its writing style is HILARIOUSLY clever
the reason LLMs use that jovial, overly friendly tone is because it's so common in journalism and marketing. this article does smell of ChatGPT, but there's absolutely no way to know for sure. people using LLMs annoy me just as much as people who are so certain that they can tell the difference
a smart person can make ChatGPT sounds completely authentic, and a very boring and middle of the road writer who uses em-dashes can make themselves sound completely inauthentic. it's not like LLMs got their style from nowhere
as far as I'm concerned, as long as the factual information has been curated by a human, I don't give a shit
Just have an AI summarize it for you /s
> or better yet, have aggregators like HN add a badge if it's likely AI generated
How could you possibly tell? I've been playing around with AI detectors, putting in known all-human samples, known all-AI samples, and mixed samples.
The only thing it's gotten right is not marking a human sample as 100% AI (but it marked one of the AI samples as 100% human).
Having such a mark would be a witch-hunt for sure.
I unironically thought this was going to be about a recent terrorist attack on a concert.
Ya same, I thought they had footage during an attack, and now had to do facial recognition to determine the perpetrators or victims
Why suggest that headlines should have enough detail to prevent people from reading the article and gaining a fuller understanding of the material? The problem isn't that headlines don't have enough details, it's that people want to or already do treat them like the full story and never have to learn anything nuanced therein.
> The band deployed live facial recognition technology that captured and analyzed attendees during their recent performance.
I think more drama has been created around this than is necessary. Based on the video, the real-time projected visitor's faces were not analyzed. They were simply shown with a random description flag attached, such as "energetic," "compassionate," "inspiring," "fitness influencer," or "cloud watcher." It seems to be an artistic provocation showing what a real people analysis could look like.
The fact that people were uncomfortable with simply having their pictures taken and shown without their knowledge gives lie to the idea that "You're in a public place—of course you have no right to privacy." It's great to be given the chance to face your principles.
Well, in the US, in a "right to work state", an employer could say "We don't support the views of this band. We saw that you were there and are going to let you go."
Or
"Data shows you hang out in low income areas, we don't think that aligns with our companies goals."
So the "face your principals" is completely fucking arbitrary. That's the fear.
Public photography is not a crime, nor should it be. However, that doesn't mean your likeness can be used for just any purpose.
> Public photography is not a crime, nor should it be.
IDK about shouldn't. Public photography not being a crime comes from a time where one could still be generally expected to remain anonymous despite being photographed. Just like how you can be seen by strangers in the street while walking and still remain anonymous. Yet stalking is a crime, and facial recognition seems to be the digital equivalent. Facial recognition is something that can be done at any point by someone with your picture in their hand.
Drama? They were making a point. And it seems like it was taken. "If this outrages you, this isn't even the tip of the iceberg compared to what governments are doing."
Saturday Night Live used to do this with their studio audience in the 1970s.The captions were silly but could have been considered insulting sometimes.
> It seems to be an artistic provocation showing what a real people analysis could look like.
I that case they should have used descriptions like "gay", "muslim", "poor", "bipolar", "twice divorced", "low quality hire", "easy to scam", "both parents dead", "rude to staff", "convicted felon", "not sexually active", "takes Metformin", "spends > $60 on alcohol a month", "dishonest", etc.
None of the people who actually take advantage of you or manipulate you using surveillance capitalism cares if you're a "cloud watcher" or "inspiring"
I tried to create an art piece sorta like this once. Video cameras in two separate places in the world, hooked up to a monitor. Made to look like a mirror, only you realize you're looking into a completely different place. So if you and someone else walk up to it, it's like you in another dimension. I was told I couldn't bring it to a regional burning man event because "it violates consent" (because they didn't consent to being filmed). Despite their being no storage or recording whatsoever and it only being a live feed to another identical event. The organizers just couldn't come to grips with the discomfort they felt that there are cameras capturing your image. We definitely need more of these projects so people don't keep their heads in the sand.
That’s really unfortunate. Having been to a regional burn before, the fact that there was no storage or recording, to me, seems to really fit the ethos: this video feed is completely ephemeral; after a frame has been displayed it has been lost forever.
I do, however, also appreciate how strict the community seems to be about recording without consent. Some people go to burns to be able to completely disconnect from their usual lives without fear that there will be any reprisal for legal/maybe-illegal-but-harmless activities they might do there, and the potential of being recorded can put a serious damper on that feeling of freedom.
That's a really cool concept, I'd love to see more art like this that uses modern technology. Do you have a demo available somewhere to see what the effect would look like? This is one of those things where you should just do it without asking for permission. The portals[0] art installation in some cities doesn't ask for consent either.
Think about the most notorious authoritarian regimes. Third Reich, GDR , USSR, Mao's China. They had relatively weak surveillance capacity. Secret police had to personally spy on the target and manually install bugs/taps. Technology was primitive and error prone. Most casual conversations were less vulnerable to spying. Rural people were relatively safe. Private conversations could be easily held in secret (e.g. walk outside, play a record).
Also consider resourcing, the manpower, money, tools, electricity devoted to surveillance back then compared to today
How about today? Where could you venture in secret without being tracked? How could you hold a private conversation? Your face & license plates are constantly tracked, along with your personal phone, laptop , watch, fitness tracker, Tire Pressure Management Systems, etc.
If you had to assign a logarithmic authoritarian intensity scale to those regimes, and to today's regimes, how would you rank them? Consider the spying capacity, resources, recording capacity, analytic capacity.
I would put today's regimes many orders of magnitude more severe.
what do you think?
Yes, though on the flip side, that power is very fragile now, relying on complex, difficult to maintain technology, with high overhead costs (aggregate, not individual). They can also more easily be turned against their creators or those who believe they have firm control but don't.
I'd say the same thing but I saw them on the Mezzanine nostalgia tour in Chicago, which was very expensive, and it was... not one of the best shows I've seen. I'd seen them a couple times prior and they were fine (I was both times surprised by the guest vocalists they'd managed to drag along on those tours). The Mezzanine tour though was like Spinal Tap's appearance on the Simpsons; "there will be no encore!".
I thoroughly enjoyed their Toronto show on that tour. To be fair it was the first time I’d seen them in concert so I didn’t have any points of comparison.
I also hadn’t really clued in to just how political they were until seeing their visuals, which I also thought added a lot. Surely not everyone’s cup of tea though.
Massive Attack has 7 albums, so what are you talking about?
From the video this appears to be face detection, with some cute strings attached at random to the detected faces.
I don't see evidence of facial recognition.
Aphex twin did this years ago, replacing his sinister face over the faces of the crowd at his concerts
In the industry, that’s known as face (or facial) detection, which is a different problem than face recognition.
Face recognition means computing which individual from some other database of people a particular face belongs to.
There’s also face tracking — detecting a face in an image and then tracking the same face across subsequent images. Which is often implemented by using a face recognition approach, but without any predefined catalog of people — you just dynamically fill up your face database as faces appear in the image sequence / video source.
It was detecting faces, not recognizing them.
Recognition implies associating the faces with an ID.
'Face detection' means it can detect faces. 'Face recognition' means it recognizes the faces. A specific example of the difference: license plate detection will detect the presence of a license plate; license plate recognition will tell you the number on that plate.
It displays the faces on the screen, and you recognize them.
How did so many people hold back the urge to make funny faces when the facial recognition was being shown?
This just looks like straight face detection and projection with a random word. How is this recognition?
generated seo slop, doesn't have its place on hn https://musicminds.com/massive-attack-turns-facial-recogniti...
Are the faces even of audience members? Seems...gimmicky. The faces don't seem to react at all, and all are making almost AI movements. Many look artificial.
And it isn't identifying the people or anything. It's putting some meaningless adjective like "Resourceful" below them.
Have seen this headline a few times and thought it was actually novel and demonstrative of some face database or something, but instead it's just a surveillance gimmick. Put a bunch of generative AI face loops with bounding boxes and adjectives.
A few sentences in, I was thinking that the article felt AI-generated, so I scrolled to the bottom of the page. There's no author listed, but there is this disclaimer:
"AI assists in refining our editorial process, ensuring that every article is engaging, clear and succinct."
One thing I hope we'll see in the future on these types of articles is the ability to view the original prompt. If your goal is to be succinct, you can't get much more succinct than that.