Reflections on artist Trevor Paglen’s (ab)use of the JAFFE dataset

Reflections on Trevor Paglen’s (ab)use of the JAFFE dataset

The article contains a historical account and commentary on Trevor Paglen and Kate Crawford’s unauthorized use of the JAFFE dataset.

Twenty-five years ago, my colleagues Miyuki Kamachi and Jiro Gyoba and I designed and photographed JAFFE, a set of facial expression images intended for use in a study of face perception. In 2019, without seeking permission or informing us, Kate Crawford and Trevor Paglen exhibited JAFFE in two widely publicized art shows. In addition, they…[Read more]

This is a gut-reaction response to the recent article “The value of mass-digitised cultural heritage content in creative contexts” by Melissa Terras, et al, published in Big Data and Society on April 6, 2021, doi: https://doi.org/10.1177/20539517211006165. My main argument is that exploiting labor and appropriating cultural heritage are int…[Read more]

Two art exhibitions, “Training Humans” and “Making Faces,” and the accompanying essay “Excavating AI: The politics of images in machine learning training sets” by Kate Crawford and Trevor Paglen, are making substantial impact on discourse taking place in the social and mass media networks, and some scholarly circles. Critical scrutiny reveals,…[Read more]

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