BRT has written a great deal about AI with one segue leading to the telescreen, the infamous device used by Big Brother to track the Winston Smiths of the world in Orwell's masterpiece ... 1984.
Behind Winston's back the voice from the telescreen was still babbling away about pig-iron and the overfulfilment of the Ninth Three-Year Plan. The telescreen received and transmitted simultaneously. Any sound that Winston made, above the level of a very low whisper, would be picked up by it, moreover, so long as he remained within the field of vision which the metal plaque commanded, he could be seen as well as heard. There was of course no way of knowing whether you were being watched at any given moment. How often, or on what system, the Thought Police plugged in on any individual wire was guesswork. It was even conceivable that they watched everybody all the time. But at any rate they could plug in your wire whenever they wanted to. You had to live -- did live, from habit that became instinct -- in the assumption that every sound you made was overheard, and, except in darkness, every movement scrutinized.
Now, in 2019, one can see the telescreen writ large whereby said tech not only watches one but also tracks emotion using one's webcam to make it happen.
Levenson decided to base his next film project on this idea. “I thought, given all this access we’ve given them to our faces, what is the most hypothetically awful thing they could possibly be doing to harm us?” he says. He imagined companies potentially analyzing users’ photographs to determine their emotions in each one, then combining this with other data to draw sweeping conclusions about people’s thoughts and preferences. “What if they correlated [the emotional analysis] with other inputs: your location via GPS or maybe the content you’re consuming,” he says. “They would know something about the way you felt about some place, some thing—or maybe even someone, if they examine your text history.” Then the tech giants could turn around and sell these data about your behaviors and opinions to other parties.
It gets better.
So Levenson began researching emotion recognition technology—and quickly realized its use might not be entirely hypothetical. “When I started googling around, I discovered the patents revealing that the tech companies had kind of beat me to it,” he says. “They had clearly been thinking about precisely the same thing for at least like five years now.” He incorporated this research into his new “interactive documentary.”
When a person watches Stealing Ur Feelings (available here) online, the viewer’s own face—frequently festooned with virtual sunglasses or other digital stickers—appears onscreen at the same time as stock imagery such as cute animals, pizza and random humans. These visuals speed by as a narrator cheerily discusses how emotion recognition works and how tech companies could use it. To demonstrate what this technology can do, the video applies it to viewers: Levenson adapted open-source code into a program that uses a device’s Web cam to analyze the viewer’s face as it reacts to the other on-screen imagery.
In other words, as you watch this video, it watches you right back.
The Telescreen ... looms.
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