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FC: "Artificial intelligence" filter blocks news -- but

------- Forwarded message follows ------- Date sent: Tue, 20 Jun 2000 09:53:37 -0400 To: politech@vorlon.mit.edu From: Declan McCullagh <declan@well.com> Subject: FC: "Artificial intelligence" filter blocks news -- but not smut Send reply to: declan@well.com

******** Some pornographic images BAIR approved as OK and my Perl test-script: http://www.well.com/user/declan/bair/ ********

http://www.wired.com/news/technology/0,1282,36923,00.html

Smut Filter Blocks All But Smut by Declan McCullagh (declan@wired.com)

3:00 a.m. Jun. 20, 2000 PDT When Exotrope Inc. introduced its BAIR smut-blocking software last year, everyone seemed wowed by the company's claims of intelligent filtering.

New York Governor George Pataki applauded Exotrope's "state-of-the-art technology," Tucows Network gave BAIR five stars, and PC Magazine handed the program a coveted editor's choice award.

But an investigation by Wired News shows that BAIR's "artificial intelligence" does not work as advertised.

In tests of hundreds of images, BAIR incorrectly blocked dozens of photographs including portraits, landscapes, animals, and street scenes. It banned readers from viewing news photos at time.com and newsweek.com, but rated images of oral sex, group sex, and masturbation as acceptable for youngsters.

Company representatives say they can't explain the program's seemingly random behavior.

"I agree with you. There's something wrong," says Dave Epler, Exotrope operations manager. "That's not the way our image server is supposed to be working."

Exotrope, a privately held firm based in Elmira, New York, claims to have developed "the industry's most advanced software system" for intelligently blocking sexually explicit images. BAIR stands for Basic Artificial Intelligence Routine.

Epler said BAIR's smart-filtering, introduced in March 1999, had worked in the past. But he was unable to produce any version of the program that performed as described.

Artificial intelligence experts say training a neural network to work the way BAIR supposedly does would be impossible. Anti-filtering advocates go a step further, and say Exotrope hoodwinked journalists and politicians into believing hype about advanced "artificial intelligence" and "active information matrix" routines.

"I think all manufacturers of blocking software have suckered journalists and politicians to some extent by claiming it is more accurate than it really is," said Bennett Haselton, founder of Peacefire.org. "This is an unusual case because we're talking about a product with a zero percent accuracy rate."

One reason why reviewers could have been mistaken is that Exotrope, like its competitors, has assembled a massive list of off-limits websites.

If an image appears on one of those blacklisted sites, or if it has words like "sex" in the filename, BAIR automatically restricts it. It also will block access based on keywords elsewhere on the Web page.

Wired News tested BAIR by creating a Perl program to extract images randomly from an 87MB database of thousands of both pornographic and non-pornographic photographs. The program then assigned each of those images random numbers as file names.

The random number requires BAIR to evaluate the graphic with its "neural network" filtering to determine whether an image is sexually explicit or not. The sex-themed images came from Usenet newsgroups such as alt.binaries.pictures.erotica.female and alt.binaries.pictures.erotica.male.

The results were dramatic: BAIR inexplicably blocked between 90 and 95 percent of the photographs with no regard for whether they were sexually explicit or not. Of the ones that were OK'd, about half were pornographic and half weren't.

BAIR incorrectly blocked photographs of Yellowstone, the Baltimore waterfront, Snoopy, boats, sunsets, dogs, vegetables and even a Wired News staff meeting.

It rated as acceptable for minors -- even on the most restrictive setting -- explicit images of oral sex, anal sex, group sex, masturbation, and ejaculation.

Exotrope officials say they plan to fix the errors within the next month. BAIR works by funneling Web connections through Exotrope's proxy server, which the company says is malfunctioning.

"We're working through our image server problems as we speak," says Exotrope's Epler. "We'll have this thing up in less than 30 days. You caught us at a bad time. I know it works very well. I did accuracy tests on this thing 30, 60 days ago and it was perfect. It went south."

When asked if Exotrope has a backup copy of a working image-recognition routine that was introduced in March 1999 and could be installed on another proxy server, Epler said he did not. "I certainly don't know of a copy," he said.

Epler also said he could not release a copy of the image-recognition routine that runs on the server, even under condition of a nondisclosure agreement.

Dave Touretzky, a senior research scientist in the computer science department at Carnegie Mellon University, doubts Exotrope's claims.

"How do you tell the difference between a woman in a bikini in a sailboat which is not racy and a naked woman in a sailboat?" Touretzky asks. "The only difference is a couple of nipples and a patch of pubic hair. You're not going to be able to find that with a neural network."

"If they don't disclose the training data, there's no way to figure out what's going on," Touretzky says. "But anyone who knows anything about neural networks knows there's no way it can do what they're claiming."

[...snip...]

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