Think about the most notorious authoritarian regimes. Third Reich, GDR , USSR, Mao's China. They had relatively weak surveillance capacity. Secret police had to personally spy on the target and manually install bugs/taps. Technology was primitive and error prone. Most casual conversations were less vulnerable to spying. Rural people were relatively safe. Private conversations could be easily held in secret (e.g. walk outside, play a record).
Also consider resourcing, the manpower, money, tools, electricity devoted to surveillance back then compared to today
How about today? Where could you venture in secret without being tracked? How could you hold a private conversation? Your face & license plates are constantly tracked, along with your personal phone, laptop , watch, fitness tracker, Tire Pressure Management Systems, etc.
If you had to assign a logarithmic authoritarian intensity scale to those regimes, and to today's regimes, how would you rank them? Consider the spying capacity, resources, recording capacity, analytic capacity.
I would put today's regimes many orders of magnitude more severe.
what do you think?
They have long been sounding the alarm to society through their art. As a longtime fan, I’m glad to see them being recognized in this way once again.
I tried to create an art piece sorta like this once. Video cameras in two separate places in the world, hooked up to a monitor. Made to look like a mirror, only you realize you're looking into a completely different place. So if you and someone else walk up to it, it's like you in another dimension. I was told I couldn't bring it to a regional burning man event because "it violates consent" (because they didn't consent to being filmed). Despite their being no storage or recording whatsoever and it only being a live feed to another identical event. The organizers just couldn't come to grips with the discomfort they felt that there are cameras capturing your image. We definitely need more of these projects so people don't keep their heads in the sand.
From the video this appears to be face detection, with some cute strings attached at random to the detected faces.
I don't see evidence of facial recognition.
Not having a clear consent statement or saying what they are doing with the data seems the correct artistic choice.
Neat and all, but I'd be even happier if they flirted with the experiment of actually touring a new album, rather than serving as trip-hop's answer to Roger Waters, touring forever on the same 12 songs.
This lends even more weight to the theory that Massive Attack’s singer is, in fact, Banksy.
The YouTube video is a year old, and says the labels are fake.
Have they done this again with an updated system?
This is face detection, not recognition. Face recognition would have a correct name underneath each face.
> Details about data storage and participant consent remain unclear
And that's part of the performance. You don't get to choose what companies do with your personal data.
Now that’s what I call art.
It’s hard to explain the concept of surveillance and its effects to laypeople. And the corporations absolutely know that.
Microsoft made something similar, years ago, at the presentation of their azure cognitive services. A camera randomly picked a live face from the audience, passed it through azure cognitive services and displayed the mood of the person in a video overlay.
Already some years ago, when I bought a ticket for Cirque de Soleil, in the fine print was already then, they could use and sell your face for AI training data.
Has it ever been confirmed if Robert Del Naja is Bansky?
Are the faces even of audience members? Seems...gimmicky. The faces don't seem to react at all, and all are making almost AI movements. Many look artificial.
And it isn't identifying the people or anything. It's putting some meaningless adjective like "Resourceful" below them.
Have seen this headline a few times and thought it was actually novel and demonstrative of some face database or something, but instead it's just a surveillance gimmick. Put a bunch of generative AI face loops with bounding boxes and adjectives.
How did so many people hold back the urge to make funny faces when the facial recognition was being shown?
This just looks like straight face detection and projection with a random word. How is this recognition?
Indeed, what is the surveillance state/economy but a "massive attack" against us all?
The big difference between this and all the other facial recognition happening is that people knew it happened. Walk into a fast food chain and take a look at all those cameras. Do you really think they aren't harvesting every possible insight from them? I can only guess what McDonald's could glean from recognizing every face and tracking time/place/order/how long you look at the menu and which items, etc etc. I don't know that that is going on but in the US with how little we have in privacy protections I must assume that they do everything I just thought of and way more. We need more people exposing what is allowed by law and pointing it out in big obvious ways, only with a banner below saying "We tell you this is happening. Corporations don't"
Just wait until Coldplay gets ahold of this tech.
Banksy does it again.
generated seo slop, doesn't have its place on hn https://musicminds.com/massive-attack-turns-facial-recogniti...
A few sentences in, I was thinking that the article felt AI-generated, so I scrolled to the bottom of the page. There's no author listed, but there is this disclaimer:
"AI assists in refining our editorial process, ensuring that every article is engaging, clear and succinct."
One thing I hope we'll see in the future on these types of articles is the ability to view the original prompt. If your goal is to be succinct, you can't get much more succinct than that.
Feels like this title could benefit from clarification that 'Massive Attack' refers to the band and not the concept of a large scale attack; perhaps "Band 'Massive Attack' Turns Concert into Facial Recognition Surveillance Experiment"
Rollercoaster headline
> The band deployed live facial recognition technology that captured and analyzed attendees during their recent performance.
I think more drama has been created around this than is necessary. Based on the video, the real-time projected visitor's faces were not analyzed. They were simply shown with a random description flag attached, such as "energetic," "compassionate," "inspiring," "fitness influencer," or "cloud watcher." It seems to be an artistic provocation showing what a real people analysis could look like.