BIY: Believe It Yourself | Hacker News Reader

BIY: Believe It Yourself

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58 pointsSchiphol14 comments

An intentionally facetious art piece based on neapolitan(italian) folklore (and other countries I guess, indian/chinese guys please confirm), that everyone familiar with italian culture will recognize as such.

Didn't expect some of the messages I'm reading here, awww, guys...

Hacker News readers have little appreciation for cultural nuance.

Oh, this has been done before:

Automated Inference on Criminality using Face Images, Wu & Zhang, 2016, Arxiv.

https://arxiv.org/pdf/1611.04135v2.pdf

Deep Neural Networks Are More Accurate Than Humans at Detecting Sexual Orientation From Facial Images, Kosinski & Wang, Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 2018.

https://www.gsb.stanford.edu/faculty-research/publications/d...

Scientists Have Created an AI That Judges You by Your Looks, futurism.com.

https://futurism.com/scientists-have-created-an-ai-that-judg...

When artificial intelligence judges a beauty contest, white people win, qz.com.

https://qz.com/774588/artificial-intelligence-judged-a-beaut...

> FACE 2 ‘JETTATORE:’Our Facial recognition is trained on specific facial physiognomies of people that normally bring bad luck (known as Jettatore)

Congratulations you made an intentionally racist computer program.

Yeah it says that in the second paragraph of the page. The projects here explicitly call out superstition and bias being built into the computers around us.

This is the funniest satire that has ever made it to the fp of this site. I was literally LOLing at the videos.

This reminds me heavily of the strange technological world of "Maniac" on Netflix, especially the computer system Gertie!

I wish I could get one of these as a gift! They are hilarious.

This looked extremely exploitative to me (specifically, crystal magic style exploitative) but apparently it is just Art so I guess that's okay. I've known some family members that are easily taken in so I generally find supporting this sort of stuffs continued existence to be in poor taste since even if a particular device is constructed to be parodizing it tends to end up being used to relieve people of their savings.

Other than that I enjoy that it's trying to pull some non-western traditions into an exhibit being displayed in Vienna.

Yeah - as interesting as it is as an art piece, I hope nobody takes it seriously.

But hey, satire is at its best when you have to squint at it for a few beats to tell that it's a joke. As long as they don't actually sell stuff like this with the same marketing, what's the harm?

It will reinforce the beliefs of gullible people about the underlying superstitions. They might not purchase it, but they will read it without realizing it is satire, and move on feeling that such things exist as evidence for such beliefs.

Isn't that the whole point of subversive art? If nobody would fall for it, how could it ever be taken seriously?

I don't think so. You have it backwards.

The point of this piece isn't to fool "superstition believers", but to draw a comparison between black-box algorithmic governence and superstition.

You're reading a level of malevolent mischievousness into "subversive art" that I don't detect.

And what about those gullible enough to have confidence in commercial AI efforts? Law Enforcement's facial recognition, automatic sentencing, insurance premiums, and a whole slew of other black-box algorithms govern our lives.

Vast swathes of the modern economy are no less superstitious than these toys.

At least, that is one thrust behind the piece.

> Subjective judgments and biased datasets can easily be turned into objective measures and potential truths, which will then be embedded in devices around us.

So you see, it's not intended to fool the gullible-vis-superstition, but to unfool the gullible-vis-technology.

This is some tech-worshipping post-apocalyptic Mechanimist shit.

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