Is your face your own? AI, Facial Recognition, and the Arts

Adam Chin, Clare Garvie, Liz O’Sullivan, and Anastasia Victor
Moderated by Seth Rosenblatt

Wednesday, July 1, 2020
6:00 PM - 7:30 PM

Moderated by Seth Rosenblatt, facial recognition and Artificial Intelligence algorithms are already a part of our day to day lives. They allow us to open our phones with a glance, superimpose animal ears on video selfies, and delight us with new music discoveries. But these same technologies are used by governments, technology companies, and police departments in ways that raise serious concerns regarding our civil liberties and expectations of privacy. 

SF Camerawork hosted an event on July 1st about the current uses of facial recognition and AI in the public sphere and in criminal justice. We explored the possible futures they portend, and the role art has in helping us understand them. Cell Signals exhibiting artist Adam Chin shares his series Front and Profile, which exposes the structural racism often built into these systems. We also heard from Clare Garvie, Senior Associate at the Center for Privacy and Technology at Georgetown Law; Liz O’Sullivan, technology director at anti-surveillance non-profit S.T.O.P. (Surveillance Technology Oversight Project); and Anastasia Victor, co-founder of PLACE, a non-profit research organization that explores the social and spatial implications of Extended Reality. The panel discussion was moderated by Seth Rosenblatt, editor-in-chief and founder of The Parallax, a news website focused on security and privacy.

Adam Chin is a fine art photographer who spent a career as a computer graphics artist for TV and film. He was one of the original employees of Pacific Data Images later part of Dreamworks Animation. Chin's did computer graphics lighting on the Shrek, Madagascar and How to Train Your Dragon series of films. Chin's practice disrupts fine art aesthetics with computer-created outputs, specifically in his most recent project Front & Profile which renders portraits derived from AI Machine Learning interpretations of antique mugshots.

Clare Garvie is Senior Associate at the Center for Privacy and Technology at Georgetown Law. Garvie is lead author on three reports on face recognition, including, most recently, America Under Watch: Face Surveillance in the United States (2019). She testified before the House Oversight Committee about police use of face recognition in 2019. Her current research focuses on the use of face recognition-derived evidence in criminal cases and the ways activists, public defenders and policymakers can ensure the technology is under control. Garvie is a graduate of Georgetown Law.

Liz O'Sullivan is technology director at anti-surveillance non-profit S.T.O.P. (Surveillance Technology Oversight Project). She’s co-founder and vice president of commercial operations at Arthur AI, an AI explainability and bias monitoring startup. From 2017-2019, O'Sullivan was head of image annotations for Clarifai. She resigned from the computer vision startup in protest to its ethics on AI + war. Liz has written about AI for the ACLU and The Campaign to Stop Killer Robots.

Seth Rosenblatt is editor-in-chief and founder of The Parallax, a news website focused on security and privacy. He has worked in online journalism since 1999, including eight years at CNET News, where he led coverage of security, privacy, and Google. Based in San Francisco, he also writes about connected technology and pop culture.

Anastasia Victor is an artist / creative technologist who explores the social impacts of emerging technologies through augmented/virtual reality (XR), interaction design, generative design and physical installation. She holds a Master of Architecture from UC Berkeley and is a former resident of the Gray Area Foundation & Mozilla XR Studio. In early 2019 she co-founded PLACE, a non-profit that researches the socio-spatial implications of XR through art, design and education. She is currently a Product Designer at Oculus, where she is working on designing operating systems for VR.

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