mmmmmkay, so lemme preface this with that I live in a small town of 2,000 people in AL
so a couple of weeks ago, the cops went to my great uncle’s house to arrest my cousin (im gonna call her K) for a “felony” (no one knows exactly why, but there is a lot of material the cops could have pulled from). once they got to the house and went up to knock on the door, and found another one of my cousins hiding place where he grew his weed plants. so then that cousin (let’s call him J). So K isnt at my great uncles house, but they caught and arrested J on a distribution and paraphernalia charge. So the cops are still looking for K, and they wind up going to her daughter’s house, to find her youngest (S) hiding her sons father, who is wanted for murder in Birmingham. So now S and her ex are arrested for that, and they picked up S’s older sister while they were there because she was on parole and was caught up with S’s shit. K still hasnt been found. The cops wind up going to my other cousin’s who live across the road from us (who are Js parents and Ks brother and sister in law) to look for K and wind up arresting my great uncle (who was at their house???? instead of his own???) because he pulled a gun on the cops, then arresting Js dad bc he punched the cop who handcuffed my great uncle. and K? she was across the street breaking into my car and stealing mywallet. the only reason we found this out is because when I went to pick my wallet up from the police station I saw all of my family’s names on the “in custody” board and my mom called the on call chief bc apparently she dated him in college and he owed her a favor.
tl;dr: all of my grandmother’s 2nd oldest brother’s family got arrested except for his son’s daughter because she moved out of this hell hole as soon as she graduated highschool
it’s 2:15 am and this is the BEST bedtime story anyone’s ever told me
Now, the alarming aspect of this story is that the very same technology is probably what tumblr is using to identify porn. Now, if it can’t tell that an empty field is not, in fact, full of sheep, what hope do we have that it can’t tell an empty room isn’t full of writing human forms engaged in passionate coitus?
this really does sound like an episode of black mirror
This is gonna produce some absolutely baffling pornography.
…. oh my fucking god they actually are using open source software. They’re using a fucking one-layer unidirectional bicategory tag-trained neural network. This will never work. Literally, it will never work. There’s just not enough algorithmic complexity to do what they’re asking of it. I bet you I could prove on a mathematical level that this joke of a neural net fundamentally lacks the abstraction necessary to do its job.
This will never get better. Their algorithm will never stop fucking up, it will never actually flag porn reliably and it will always require a massive quantity of human hours to deal with the deluge of mistagged pictures. This isn’t just a case of an insufficiently trained algorithm, it’s just … this is the most basic neural network you can make. It probably hasa a lot of neurons and has loads of training data but like … you can’t just brute force this kind of stuff. One layer of neurons is just Not Enough.
Also, just to make this clear, Tumblr lied. I mean, we already know this, but I mean they liiiieeeeed. All that stuff they promised about what would or would not be censored? That cannot be delivered on with a system this simple. Nude classical sculptures, political protests, male-presenting nipples (really Tumblr?), nude art outside the context of sex, all that? You cannot train a bicategory one-layer neural network to exclude those things. It cannot be done. Tumblr never intended for those things to actually be permitted, they were just lying. Because the system they have cannot actually do what they said it would and never will be able to.
Also, this kind of system is super vulnerable to counter-neural strategies. I bet you before the end of the month someone hooks up their own open source one layer bicategory neural network which puts an imperceptible (to humans) layer of patterned static over arbitrary images, and trains it by having it bot-post static-ed images to Tumblr and reinforcing based on whether the images are labeled nsfw or sfw. Seriously, within a month someone will have an input-output machine which can turn any image ‘sfw’ in Tumblr’s eyes.
This is genuinely pathetic. Like, I have real pity for whoever implemented this, because it’s clear Tumblr doesn’t actually have any engineers with any expertise with machine learning left at all and they foisted the job off on some poor bastard who has no idea what they’re doing and is going to get all kinds of flak for their (perfectly reasonable and predetermined) failure from management.
As has been pointed out before, there are no humans behind this at all. The review process just reruns either the same algorithm or another algorithm, but people have posted screen shots showing obviously SFW pictures that were still deemed NSFW on review, despite the fact that any human, no matter how overworked / tired would have seen that these pictures were not porn.
Meanwhile, yesterday, I received a notification indicating that my blog was the origin of actual live-action porn gifs – which were not actually on my blog but the origination tag nonetheless redirected back to my most-heavily-reblogged extremely SFW/containing no images at all protest post.
[image description start as written by op: Five semi-achromatic panels feat Davenport and the crew. Panel 1, Davenport, a mustached gnome in red IPRE jacket speaks in front of the other birds, “Crew, I hope I don’t need to remind you that this is a formal event-” Panel 2, “-and as such, you need to dress formally-” Davenport says turned to Magnus and Merle, who are smiling kitty faces and dressed. Questionably. Magnus, burly human with sideburns, is wearing a knotted t shirt under his sleeveless IPRE jacket and Merle, bushy dwarf, has an irregularly striped shirt under a large polka dot unbuttoned button up. Panel 3, However Davenport ends this statement glaring over his shoulder at, “-BARRY.” Barry, points to himself, confused and says, “Me?” Davenport tells him, “Don’t wear bluejeans.” Panel 4, Barry, tired human necromancer, looks a bit huffed as he shoves his hands into his IPRE robe pockets and says, “I wasn’t gonna wear blueje-” but Davenport cuts him off and adds, “Nor black jeans.” Panel 5, Davenport is silent as Barry avoids eye contact and hunches his shoulders for a moment before saying, “… U-Unrelated but Taako wanna go shopping. Like now?” End ID!]
What a beautiful day to remember that Bisexual characters in media don’t need to be with someone of the same sex to be representation for the LGBT and specifically the bisexual community.
protip if a nerd dude tries to give you a pop quiz about the fandom on your shirt/bag/cosplay by asking you to answer a banal and obscure trivia question to prove you’re a Real Gamer, turn the question back on him. ask him about the thematic implications that bit of trivia has on the actual story. ask him about the character development and motivations of the minor characters he’s making you list. ask him if he thinks the major in-universe event he’s testing you on was successful in carrying forward the underlying tone and intent of the work itself. ask him about fucking literary devices. you know that one super tough and intimidating lit teacher everyone encounters at least once in their lifetime? become that teacher. make him sweat.
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