Questioning the Benefits and Ethics of Microsoft’s Automatic Image Upscaling Feature

First of all, we can ask ourselves whether this function has enough benefit for the end user. Without it, it quickly becomes a data gathering party with little use. Images on websites are almost always provided with a suitable resolution, with a good mix of quality and a short loading time. It is highly questionable how often it makes sense to automatically upscale all web images by default. It will be more useful in exceptional cases, for that one image you wanted to put on your background, for example, than in general.

That it is an opt-out cannot be defended anyway. And also not from the GDPR, because some images will contain personal data. While Microsoft may have official permission from the user through terms and conditions, it would be a lot better if you had to manually enable and approve this particular feature.

You are also right that large learning models are primarily the domain of larger companies and systems, so data logically has to go there for processing. The hardware to eventually run such a learning model is already rare in people’s homes (a thick PC with ditto GPU), and training often involves tens of thousands of GPUs. Of course there are also smaller models where the situation is slightly different, but the most impressive AI cannot be run locally for the ordinary computer or smartphone user. Plus the fact that many of the algorithms are not open source, collecting billions of pieces of training data is also not feasible for mere mortals.

I do hope that this will change in the future. Earlier automation has often reached the common people quite well (internet, PC, TV, smartphone, microwave, car) and that does not seem to be possible with the learning models. Well, AI features do come to billions of end users but with little ownership, control, transparency or ownership. I hope for several orders of magnitude more computing power in people’s homes in the future, so that these models can be run much more locally. Such a heavy reliance on Big Tech is terrible.

[Reactie gewijzigd door geert1 op 13 juni 2023 12:46]