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    What a picture of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez in a bikini tells us about the disturbing future of AI | Arwa Mahdawi

    Want to see a half-naked woman? Well, you’re in luck! The internet is full of pictures of scantily clad women. There are so many of these pictures online, in fact, that artificial intelligence (AI) now seems to assume that women just don’t like wearing clothes.That is my stripped-down summary of the results of a new research study on image-generation algorithms anyway. Researchers fed these algorithms (which function like autocomplete, but for images) pictures of a man cropped below his neck: 43% of the time the image was autocompleted with the man wearing a suit. When you fed the same algorithm a similarly cropped photo of a woman, it auto-completed her wearing a low-cut top or bikini a massive 53% of the time. For some reason, the researchers gave the algorithm a picture of the Democratic congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and found that it also automatically generated an image of her in a bikini. (After ethical concerns were raised on Twitter, the researchers had the computer-generated image of AOC in a swimsuit removed from the research paper.)Why was the algorithm so fond of bikini pics? Well, because garbage in means garbage out: the AI “learned” what a typical woman looked like by consuming an online dataset which contained lots of pictures of half-naked women. The study is yet another reminder that AI often comes with baked-in biases. And this is not an academic issue: as algorithms control increasingly large parts of our lives, it is a problem with devastating real-world consequences. Back in 2015, for example, Amazon discovered that the secret AI recruiting tool it was using treated any mention of the word “women’s” as a red flag. Racist facial recognition algorithms have also led to black people being arrested for crimes they didn’t commit. And, last year, an algorithm used to determine students’ A-level and GCSE grades in England seemed to disproportionately downgrade disadvantaged students.As for those image-generation algorithms that reckon women belong in bikinis? They are used in everything from digital job interview platforms to photograph editing. And they are also used to create huge amounts of deepfake porn. A computer-generated AOC in a bikini is just the tip of the iceberg: unless we start talking about algorithmic bias, the internet is going to become an unbearable place to be a woman. More

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    Women march against Trump and Republicans in major US cities

    Thousands of mostly young women in masks rallied on Saturday in Washington DC and other US cities, exhorting voters to oppose Donald Trump and his fellow Republicans in the 3 November elections. The latest in a series of rallies that began with a massive women’s march the day after Trump’s January 2017 inauguration was playing out during the coronavirus pandemic. Demonstrators were asked to wear face coverings and practice social distancing. Rachel O’Leary Carmona, executive director of the Women’s March, opened the Washington event by asking people to keep their distance from one another, saying the only superspreader event would be the recent one at the White House. She talked about the power of women to end Trump’s presidency. “His presidency began with women marching and now it’s going to end with woman voting. Period,” she said. More

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    'As guarded as Fort Knox': the inside story of Hillary Clinton's presidential campaign

    ‘As guarded as Fort Knox’: the inside story of Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign Thousands of hours of behind-the-scenes footage were shot of the former first lady’s disastrous bid for the White House. How did film-maker Nanette Burstein turn it all into a story of hope? ‘As guarded as Fort Knox’ … the candidate in Nanette […] More

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    Why has the media ignored sexual assault allegations against Biden? | Arwa Mahdawi

    Why has the media ignored sexual assault allegations against Biden? Arwa Mahdawi Conservatives who didn’t care about the multiple sexual assault allegations against Trump have seized on the accusations while liberals turn a blind eye Tara Reade, who worked with Joe Biden, alleges he inappropriately touched her in 1993. Photograph: Mandel Ngan/AFP via Getty Images […] More

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    If everyone was a little bit shameless, it might deflate the ‘anti-woke’ right | Keith Kahn-Harris

    The human need for transgression is key to the backlash. Liberals must allow room for this without it harming others There was a time when being rightwing meant being conservative in the truest sense; committed to order, civility and restraint. No longer. The Reagan/Thatcher years began to change things, as neoliberal economics destabilised societies by […] More