Excavating AI

An investigation into the politics of training sets, and the fundamental problems with classifying humans.

Excavating AI - Scroll Excavating AI The Politics of Images in Machine Learning Training Sets By Kate Crawford and Trevor Paglen You open up a database of pictures used to train artificial intelligence systems. At first, things seem straightforward. You’re met with thousands of images: apples and oranges, birds, dogs, horses, mountains, clouds, houses, and street signs. But as you probe further into the dataset, people begin to appear: cheerleaders, scuba divers, welders, Boy Scouts, fire walkers, and flower girls. Things get strange: A photograph of a woman smiling in a bikini is labeled a “s

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