Would you willingly participate in creating a product like these?
Tags: ethics, discuss
Published: 2018-11-21 19:00:16

A friend told me about [this site](https://www.faception.com/). I didn't believe her at first, then the tweets started and my hopes in the future of the human kind took a nose dive out of my office Window. To make things worst I've found [this list](https://github.com/daviddao/awful-ai).

Take a peek at the second item:

## Discrimination

[HireVue](https://www.hirevue.com/) - App that scans your face and tells companies whether you’re worth hiring. [[summary](https://www.theladders.com/career-advice/ai-screen-candidates-hirevue)]

[AI-based Gaydar](https://osf.io/zn79k/) - Artificial intelligence can accurately guess whether people are gay or straight based on photos of their faces, according to new research that suggests machines can have significantly better “gaydar” than humans. [[summary](https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2017/sep/07/new-artificial-intelligence-can-tell-whether-youre-gay-or-straight-from-a-photograph)]

[Racist Chat Bots](https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2016/mar/24/tay-microsofts-ai-chatbot-gets-a-crash-course-in-racism-from-twitter) - Microsoft chatbot called Tay spent a day learning from Twitter and began spouting antisemitic messages.

[Racist Auto Tag](https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2015/jul/01/google-sorry-racist-auto-tag-photo-app) - a Google image recognition program labeled the faces of several black people as gorillas.

[PredPol](http://www.predpol.com/) - PredPol, a program for police departments that predicts hotspots where future crime might occur, could potentially get stuck in a feedback loop of over-policing majority black and brown neighborhoods. [[summary](https://www.themarshallproject.org/2016/02/03/policing-the-future?ref=hp-2-111#.UyhBLnmlj)]

[COMPAS](http://www.equivant.com/challenges/supervision-and-compliance-monitoring) - is a risk assessment algorithm used in legal courts by the state of Wisconsin to predict the risk of recidivism. Its manufacturer refuses to disclose the proprietary algorithm and only the final risk assessment score is known. The algorithm is biased against blacks (even worse than humans). [[summary](https://www.propublica.org/article/machine-bias-risk-assessments-in-criminal-sentencing)][[NYT opinion](https://www.nytimes.com/2017/10/26/opinion/algorithm-compas-sentencing-bias.html)]

[Infer Criminality From Your Face](https://arxiv.org/abs/1611.04135) - A program that judges if you’re a criminal from your facial features. [[summary](https://www.technologyreview.com/s/602955/neural-network-learns-to-identify-criminals-by-their-faces/)]

[iBorderCtrl](https://ec.europa.eu/research/infocentre/article_en.cfm?artid=49726) - AI-based polygraph test for travellers entering the European Union (trial phase). Likely going to have a high number of false positives, considering how many people cross the EU borders every day. Furthermore, facial recognition algorithms are prone to racial bias. [[summary](https://gizmodo.com/an-ai-lie-detector-is-going-to-start-questioning-travel-1830126881)]

[Faception](https://www.faception.com/) - Based on facial features, Faception claims that it can reveal personality traits e.g. "Extrovert, a person with High IQ, Professional Poker Player or a threats". They build models that classifies faces into categories such as Pedophile, Terrorist, White-Collar Offenders and Bingo Players without prior knowledge. [[classifiers](https://www.faception.com/our-technology)][[video pitch](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x1QsDiWCV-o)]

As Software Engineers/Developers/Freelancers from a third world country, my friends and I use to joke about "The Oppenheimer Factor", meaning an hypothetical scenario where our work is used to create some nefarious piece of software. This list is not related to that, these are people that **willingly** participate in tearing apart the few good things we have left on this Earth. So I ask you, would you willingly become one of those people? Why?.