Kashmir Hill, what you need to know about the face-stealing app

An article by Francesco Berlucchi

Kashmir Hill discovered the existence of the startup Clearview AI just a few months after becoming a reporter for The New York Times. A story too big not to be told on the pages of the world's most famous newspaper. Indeed, not to write a book about it. Thus was born "Your Face Belongs to Us" ("La tua faccia ci appartiene", Orville Press publisher, translated by Vittoria Parodi), the investigation into the startup that put artificial intelligence at the service of image collection, using these frames for large-scale facial recognition.

"When I heard about it, I wondered if this technology was real and, above all, who was behind it," the journalist recounts in the Crypt of the Aula Magna during the presentation of her book promoted by the Humane Technology Lab (HTLab) of the Università Cattolica. "I spoke to law enforcement, they confirmed that it was a very powerful technology. They would upload my photo to prove it to me. However, since then, I haven't heard from anyone. They had received an alert: I had been recognized by Clearview AI. So I set out to find the headquarters of the startup, but it felt like being in a Harry Potter book, searching for Platform 9 3/4."

The spy story told by Hill helps us reflect on the future that awaits us. And on "how invasive and intrusive these technologies can be, with our consent," as Massimo Sideri, columnist for Corriere della Sera, who moderated the event, points out. According to Sideri, the New York Times reporter is "one of the most interesting voices in describing the ongoing transformation." On these topics, she is "the signature to follow" for the New York daily, and thanks to her investigative journalism style, the book guides us step by step through the "worrying investigation" conducted by Hill.

"Imagine a world in which people can give consent to facial recognition, and through glasses, they can be recognized. Would you accept?" the journalist asks the audience present in the Crypt, which responds very skeptically. "To the same question, in San Francisco, more than half of the people said yes." "Studies we conducted at the Università Cattolica have shown that intelligent technologies, such as robotics and artificial intelligence, have brought about a profound change in our perspective," explains Giuseppe Riva, director of HTLab. "When humans and robots found themselves collaborating, we asked the former if they preferred to lead the action. 80% of people chose to leave the responsibility of the action to the robots."

The reason? Quickly said. "The robot, being intelligent, would never make a mistake," explains the director of the Laboratory of the Università Cattolica investigating the relationship between human experience and technology, because "culturally, we are told that technology does not make mistakes." Yet, behind the "presumed objectivity" of artificial intelligence, many other problems lurk. "We forget that even the most advanced artificial intelligence is trained based on data," concludes Professor Riva. "It predicts our past, while we humans have to predict the future. And only humans can do that. At least for now, and still for a long time."

The interview is published on Secondo Tempo.