Ukraine Government Confirms It Is Using Clearview AI To Identify… Dead Russian Soldiers?
Last week, Reuters broke the quasi-news that Clearview had offered its tech to the war effort in Ukraine. According to statements made solely by the company and its CEO, Hoan Ton-That, the Ukraine government was using Clearview's 10-billion facial image database (all scraped for free from the open web) to identify dead bodies, point out Russian traitors within their midst, and (somehow) combat misinformation.
Some verification of Clearview's claims has finally arrived. And it only confirms one-third of the facial recognition tech company's claims. And it may be generous to call this one-third." (h/t Michael Vario)
Ukraine is using facial recognition software to identify the bodies of Russian soldiers killed in combat and to trace their families to inform them of their deaths, Ukraine's vice prime minister told Reuters.
The reality is far more compassionate than Clearview's self-serving press release that was reported without skepticism by Reuters. Clearview said its AI would be used to identify Russian soldiers, giving the impression it would lead to acts of reprisal by Ukraine combatants. Instead, the government is using the AI in the best possible way: to identify soldiers sent on Vladimir Putin's fool's errand so that their families may properly mourn their lost ones and (hopefully) direct their anger towards the shitty government that determined this sacrifice was necessary.
Make no mistake: Clearview is still super-shitty. That it has temporarily clad itself in yellow and blue doesn't change anything. Clearview could have offered its AI to any number of war-torn nations but did nothing until it found a socially acceptable battlefield that mainly involved white combatants before it engaged its dormant largesse. Like any other facial recognition AI, the software works better when it has white male faces to work with and this battle between Ukraine and Russia is loaded with the sort of faces this tech is built to handle.
If nothing else, this effort may produce better estimates of the death toll in Ukraine. The Russian government hasn't updated its Ukraine war death toll since March 2. At that point, it claimed it had only lost 498 soldiers. Ukraine government estimates put the number of Russian soldier deaths somewhere north of 15,000.
Ukraine - despite being invaded by a megalomaniacal despot - continues to retain its humanity. It has created an online portal Russian families can use to search for information about loved ones involved in this war. Using this portal, Russians can claim the bodies of dead combatants, something the Ukraine government appears to believe is the least it can do while being attacked by a former KGB shitlord who can't fathom why non-Russian countries would resist his heavy-handed, missile-lobbing overtures.
The downside here is that, while the intention may be pure, the tech is imperfect.
Richard Bassed, head of the forensic medicine department at Monash University in Australia, said fingerprints, dental records and DNA remain the most common ways of confirming someone's identity.
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But clouded eyes and injured and expressionless faces potentially make facial recognition unreliable on the dead, said Bassed, who has been researching the technology.
But the effort continues. The Ukraine government has proven far more compassionate and aware of the limitations of the tech than its temporary benefactor. That the Ukraine government has chosen to use Clearview's AI to reunite Russians with their deceased loved ones reflects well on only one party: the Ukraine government. Clearview never even suggested this option when it was busy blowing its own horn last week. Clearview is still garbage. That one entity has chosen to use it for good doesn't change anything.