Xbox actually recently came out with an Xbox branded minifridge and it immediately made me think of this. Sounds like it's an april fools joke but Im pretty sure it's legit
This is I believe the first time in human history that AI video cameras have been widely deployed, inside private homes, for the purpose of enforcing laws. Never mind the banal details: this is an incredible milestone.
The chinese app wechat already does this in private homes for the purpose of enforcing KYC and "misinformation tracking" - you are required to repeat after it, repeat every phoneme/syllable to form a voiceprint (and coincidentally enough to basically train something to replicate your speech), look straight ahead, rotate around your head, and follow its instructions to sign in again.
Also, asking two verified-ID mainland china users to "vouch" for you and be responsible for your activities if you are a foreigner.
Almost every service in China requires "real name verification" - you can't play games without it, for example.
It's amazing! Hundreds of SciFi writers predicted such surveillance, I dont think many predicted it arrive by invitation - i expect many parents will support this.
Same for smart speakers. It's a hairs breadth away from complete audio & video surveillance.
Not inside the private homes, but in 2008, Tabaco vending machines with facial recognition feature to verify the age(20+ years old) are deployed in Japan.
The result was amusing. It was busted by picture of adult face, or by kids moving facial muscles.
The word "incredible" usually has a positive connotation, of something impressive being achieved that benefits society. Those case is incredible, but has such severe privacy concerns that there is no such positive effect present. AI has a great deal of promise if used responsibly, but gross invasion of privacy shows promise of a different kind. This is a horrific milestone.
>first time in human history that AI video cameras have been widely deployed, inside private homes, for the purpose of enforcing laws
Knowingly maybe. But all those IP Cameras have had face detection for almost a decade, They've been deployed extensively in homes around the world, They've been phoning to their home to provide even basic features or at least the DDNS based features and are riddled with vulnerabilities.
One could use firewall, custom firmware to fix this to an extent but not everyone has the means or intention to do it.
It's not the first time. All smartfones have a microfone and a camera. And if you think that they are used only for making pictures and talking on the phone - dream on.
For context, these are China's current restrictions on gaming for minors (under age 18):
- Maximum 1.5 hours of gaming on weekdays
- Maximum 3 hours of gaming on weekends
- No games between 10pm and 8am (note that school typically starts between 7 and 8am)
South Korea has similar types of restrictions, by the way. No gaming for minors (under 16) between midnight and 6am. I think Vietnam may have something similar as well.
I had no idea such laws existed. That's pretty crazy. But then, this is a gov't that does not trust its citizens to raise their own children, or even historically to decide how many kids to have.
When I was a kid in America, my parents disallowed videogames in the house. No NES or Genesis for us. On the occasions I'd go over to other kids' houses and play, I had no idea what I was doing. On the one hand, this seemed oppressive. But at least it was coming from my parents, not from the gov't.
What we did have was a Mac II that I had pretty much free reign on, as long as I wasn't playing games. This is how I learned to code - trying to write my own games. In the long run, it made me a pretty bad gamer; I have the gaming equivalent of an eating disorder (I have serious guilt issues with playing anything for more than a couple hours). But it made me a pretty decent hacker.
Obviously, it's disgusting for the gov't to do anything along these lines with facial recognition of minors who should be even more protected from surveillance than the adult public. Extremely Orwellian. But I'm interested what kind of unanticipated side effects it might have as far as kids learning to roll-their-own entertainment.
The backdrop to this is how unbelievably predatory f2p East Asian games are when it comes to slot machine mechanics and whale hunting. Most adults in Japan, I read, think of video games as if they are the same as casino games. It wasn’t until 10 years ago that the west really got on that bandwagon, but now I think we’re leaders in this. Eg, blizzard switching f2p games with loot boxes so heavily, and aiming to make a new Diablo as a mobile game
There's a well-known open secret that every kid in South Korea have perfectly memorized either their mom or dad's citizen ID (the full 13 digits). There's also a statistic that the distribution of age in kid's popular online games is centered around the 40s/50s... you get the idea. Children usually borrow IDs/phones from your parents or other adult acquaintances (whether it be with or without permission.)
Though PC-bangs (Internet cafes) are where you can't get away with this restriction - usually they check your IDs and kick all minors out when it becomes 10pm. What really sucks for kids in South Korea is that cram schools (hagwons) also end at 10pm (another national restriction) - which means that after a stressful day in hagwon they have no time to actually play without circumventing the rules...
> South Korea has similar types of restrictions, by the way. No gaming for minors (under 16) between midnight and 6am.
I'm disappointed but not surprised that China makes rules like this, but I always thought South Korea was basically a free country and never expected this sort of rule from them.
Also limits monthly microtransactions from $28 to $57 depending on age. Knowing Chinese chicken (helicopter) parents, these restrictions are overwhelmingly government listening to public opinion. Sucks for the kids, but really only affects always online products from domestic services. Infinite amount of offline DRM free options to still waste time on, much less gacha/gambly than what's being pushed these days. Kids grew up on gameboys and emulators fine - I know folks with strict parents that that gamed exclusively on a TI83. This is far from an effective ban on video games.
Man that fucking sucks. I spent far more time than that playing CS1.6 as a kid, I turned out fine.
I would be absolutely livid if my government tried to tell me how much time I could spend doing what I wanted, and remember distinctly being conscious of making those decisions for myself from at least 12+ (lying a lot because of the amount of services that made me say I was over 13).
This is clearly (at least to the Western sensibilities) a vast government overreach into private life, but can we marvel for a second at a company employing AI to curb addictive behavior towards its product? I definitely don't agree with the government mandates dictating how and when you can play video games, but it is kind of incredible to see a company use AI for something other than encouraging addictive behavior like many US tech companies do.
> employing AI to curb addictive behavior towards its product
Not out of goodwill.
Tencent profits hugely from gaming addiction, they know it and exploit it to whatever extent they could without drawing serious ire. They use their near monopoly on personal communications (WeChat, QQ) and huge market share on social media (WeChat), video streaming (Tencent Video) and other forms of media to subtly and not-so-subtly push their cash cow games, Honor of Kings being the prime example. I won’t list the shady tactics I’ve heard, which you can hear from I suppose any young urban-dwelling person in China.
They are a big part of the problem in the first place.
When I spend too much time on TikTok (about an hour I think), it slips in a video of a relatable young person saying something like “hold on! You’ve been scrolling for way too long now!…” or alternatively, “I understand it’s easy to keep watching videos, and trust me I’ve been there before, but those videos will still be there tomorrow. So go get some extra sleep, turn your phone off, do yourself that favor and have a great night”.
The experience is probably the digital equivalent of hitting rock bottom, but it does shame me into stopping and is probably good for my mental health overall.
I can’t imagine a western company doing that for their customers. Can you imagine Facebook actively trying to get you to spend less time on their platform? The closest is Netflix “are you still there?” but they’re just trying to save bandwidth.
Is it? The incredible thing would be if they used AI for something better than addictive behavior. Doing it for something worse is the expected course of action.
Companies like tencent are very different to private companies in the West - and will much more readily do what the Chinese government tells them to do. Private companies in the west will collaborate with the government at all, but they complain more and keep it secret.
This move won’t be done from the kindness of their heart and to get kids to reduce gaming consumption - it will be a move they have been instructed to do from the Chinese government.
These companies can’t really push back either - if you want an example see what happened to Jack Ma.
Obviously there’s cultural factors at play, I just wonder whether strategically it’s wise to teach kids externally imposed restrictions rather than learning to restrict themselves intrinsically because something else is worth doing? It’s kind of the metaphor of the kid with the very strict upbringing that has no self control when they move away from their family.
Everytime I think software is already ridiculous and going to far something happens that goes so far I can hardly believe it. This is one of those things.
It won't take long at this rate until it's completely normal for the software of big companies deciding what you can and can't do at all times during the day.
> a time-sensitive facial recognition ... linked with big data from the central public security system ... "We will conduct a face screening for accounts registered with real names and that have played for a certain period of time at night" ... Facial recognition is a welcome sign
So here is the image in my head: A man, Mr Zhao, 35 years old, just finished showering, half naked, lying on his bed, playing a Tencent game before sleep. Then, all of a sudden, a pop up showed up, "To protect the flowers of our bright future, please verify you are you, Mr Zhao".
Now, think what Mr Zhao would do? Get all dressed up, lights on and fully prepared for the "Verification Interview" with the AI (and maybe a night shift worker at Tencent too)? Nah... Probably not.
Hahaha! Poor Mr Zhao, been forced to take a "bed photo", right?
Well, it's funny to think until you realized a 8 years old could also lying on his bed a play Tencent game on parents phone before sleep.
And what Tencent want to do? Capture optical data and possibly send it to multiple storage and processing sites over the Internet?
Yeah, great idea, way to go boy!
My final point: I use few Tencent products and I know a lots of smart engineers in Tencent. But been their user, I often just can't understand how can they design their product so wrong. This facial recognition powered "Child Predator" can be an example of that -- High tech? Yes; Very wrong? Yes.
Could Tencent please put their talents to good use instead of build something brain-dead like this one?
As I read this the first thought that came to mind is if I were a kid, I would be very angry about it, and dedicate myself to defeating the system. I can’t help but hope the kids playing these games feel the same way.
Getting sick of this kind of things. I'm starting to think maybe I should remove as many electronics as possible and start learning electronics myself. It's sad that we are entering the golden age of electronics (with a bit of $$ and knowledge you can build products that are genuinely useful in a couple of weeks) and also the dark age of electronic surveillience.
In China it is the law that minors have restrictions on playing video games between 10pm and 8am.
I suspect that on this forum there would be a mix of opinion about if that is a good idea or not. I mean, personally I think it should be up to parents to manage this, but I can totally see how some would have the opposite opinion about it. I don't think it's totally out of bounds as a concept for government to regulate this.
I have seen plenty of people calling for laws regulating mystery boxes for example on this very forum, and you could have the exact same parental responsibility argument there too.
The main difference is that in the US, were such a law passed, then tech companies would do some minimum amount of compliance such as requiring that you send a picture of ID or some such and then call it done. If minors manage to get around that by getting photos of their parents ID, well, what is a company to do?
In China the government doesn't care about your excuses. Children are playing your game anyway? Well, we are shutting you down then.
Horrifying usage aside... I'm curious about the tech here as it relates to structural bias.
In the US there are frequent stories about how ML works well on white men, but not, e.g., African Americans and I think Asian Americans. There was that Twitter spat between Timnit Gebru and Andrej Karpathy about this subject, and whether it's "just" training data or inherent in ML, partly because of who runs the analyses and who the wealthy consumers are, etc. Having trained some models and fiddled with hyperparameters myself, I could see the argument that it's a little more than just the training data; for example, how the algorithm uses contrast or what kind of angles it picks up.
But what I'm curious about is how well this system works here, developed by a Chinese company with Chinese developers for primarily Chinese users. Does it have better accuracy than Google on the same Chinese data set? Does it have worse accuracy on white people than Google?
I imagine the data is not out there, but maybe there's some published research along these lines by Tencent, or others comparing algorithms or models trained on Tencent data sets to the western equivalents?
What worries me is that this is at odds with Tencent's revenue model. How likely it is it that this was planned all along? Would it be possible that it's just the first step (nobody would argue about "protecting" children) to more invasive surveillance?
Gaming addiction is absolutely an issue - but it seems to be used to push all kinds of tech that has nothing to do with it. Like, how exactly does real-name registration combat addiction?
Technology, surveillance and privacy in China is an ongoing topic of interest here and in news outlets. (Obviously it's a topic that's of interest in relation to other places as well.) The excesses of one generation can lead to the reforms of a subsequent one, and I'm curious whether there will be a counter-reaction among young people in China if at some point they perceive a line to have been crossed, and where that line might be.
[+] [-] anonymouszx|4 years ago|reply
>wake up feeling sick after a late night of playing video games
>excited to play some halo infinite
>"xbox on"
>"XBOX ON"
>"Please verify that you are "annon332" by saying Doritos™ Dew™ it right!"
>"ERROR! Please drink a verification can"
>reach into my Dontos Mountain Halo War Chest
>only a few cans left, needed to verify 14 times last night
>still feeling sick from the 14
>force it down and grumble out "mmmm that really hit the spot"
>xbox does nothing
>i attempt to smile
>"Connecting to verification server"
>"Verification complete!"
>finally
>boot up halo infinite
>finding multiplayer match...
>"ERRORI User attempting to steal online gameplay!"
>my mother just walked in the room
>"Adding another user to your pass, this will be charged to your credit card. Do you accept?"
>"No!"
>"Console entering lock state!"
>"to unlock drink verification can"
>last can
>"WARNING, OUT OF VERIFICATION CANS, an order has been shipped and charged to your credit card"
>drink half the can, oh god im going to be sick
>pour the last half out the window
>"PIRACY DETECTED! PLEASE COMPLETE THIS ADVERTISEMENT TO CONTINUE"
>the mountain dew ad plays
>i have to dance for it
>feeling so sick
>makes me sing along
>dancing and singing
>"mountain dew is for me and you"
>throw up on my self
>throw up on my tv and entertainment system
>router shorts
>"ERROR NO CONNECTION! XBOX SHUTTING OFF"
[+] [-] 93po|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] svieira|4 years ago|reply
(If you've never read Venus, Inc. it's even better than Manna and it's more on-point; and it was written in the 1950s!)
https://smile.amazon.com/Venus-Inc-Space-Merchants-War/dp/B0...
[+] [-] no-dr-onboard|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Razengan|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Chris2048|4 years ago|reply
This is the real nightmare, active (mandatory) ad participation.
Drink the Kool Aid, say "Oh Yeah!!!"
[+] [-] unknown|4 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] perihelions|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ev1|4 years ago|reply
Also, asking two verified-ID mainland china users to "vouch" for you and be responsible for your activities if you are a foreigner.
Almost every service in China requires "real name verification" - you can't play games without it, for example.
This has been place for several years, https://i.imgur.com/FBrCwuX.jpg
[+] [-] userbinator|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] doublejay1999|4 years ago|reply
Same for smart speakers. It's a hairs breadth away from complete audio & video surveillance.
[+] [-] ashleyn|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ezoe|4 years ago|reply
The result was amusing. It was busted by picture of adult face, or by kids moving facial muscles.
[+] [-] gentleman11|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] MereInterest|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Abishek_Muthian|4 years ago|reply
Knowingly maybe. But all those IP Cameras have had face detection for almost a decade, They've been deployed extensively in homes around the world, They've been phoning to their home to provide even basic features or at least the DDNS based features and are riddled with vulnerabilities.
One could use firewall, custom firmware to fix this to an extent but not everyone has the means or intention to do it.
[+] [-] unknown|4 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] Proven|4 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] hulitu|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] rococode|4 years ago|reply
- Maximum 1.5 hours of gaming on weekdays
- Maximum 3 hours of gaming on weekends
- No games between 10pm and 8am (note that school typically starts between 7 and 8am)
South Korea has similar types of restrictions, by the way. No gaming for minors (under 16) between midnight and 6am. I think Vietnam may have something similar as well.
[+] [-] noduerme|4 years ago|reply
When I was a kid in America, my parents disallowed videogames in the house. No NES or Genesis for us. On the occasions I'd go over to other kids' houses and play, I had no idea what I was doing. On the one hand, this seemed oppressive. But at least it was coming from my parents, not from the gov't.
What we did have was a Mac II that I had pretty much free reign on, as long as I wasn't playing games. This is how I learned to code - trying to write my own games. In the long run, it made me a pretty bad gamer; I have the gaming equivalent of an eating disorder (I have serious guilt issues with playing anything for more than a couple hours). But it made me a pretty decent hacker.
Obviously, it's disgusting for the gov't to do anything along these lines with facial recognition of minors who should be even more protected from surveillance than the adult public. Extremely Orwellian. But I'm interested what kind of unanticipated side effects it might have as far as kids learning to roll-their-own entertainment.
[+] [-] gentleman11|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] lasagnaphil|4 years ago|reply
Though PC-bangs (Internet cafes) are where you can't get away with this restriction - usually they check your IDs and kick all minors out when it becomes 10pm. What really sucks for kids in South Korea is that cram schools (hagwons) also end at 10pm (another national restriction) - which means that after a stressful day in hagwon they have no time to actually play without circumventing the rules...
[+] [-] josephcsible|4 years ago|reply
I'm disappointed but not surprised that China makes rules like this, but I always thought South Korea was basically a free country and never expected this sort of rule from them.
[+] [-] dirtyid|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] antihero|4 years ago|reply
I would be absolutely livid if my government tried to tell me how much time I could spend doing what I wanted, and remember distinctly being conscious of making those decisions for myself from at least 12+ (lying a lot because of the amount of services that made me say I was over 13).
[+] [-] karmasimida|4 years ago|reply
So it is true, Chinese parents, or Confucian inspired ones, see gaming as something more sinister than drugs.
[+] [-] voidnullnil|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] eloisius|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] oefrha|4 years ago|reply
Not out of goodwill.
Tencent profits hugely from gaming addiction, they know it and exploit it to whatever extent they could without drawing serious ire. They use their near monopoly on personal communications (WeChat, QQ) and huge market share on social media (WeChat), video streaming (Tencent Video) and other forms of media to subtly and not-so-subtly push their cash cow games, Honor of Kings being the prime example. I won’t list the shady tactics I’ve heard, which you can hear from I suppose any young urban-dwelling person in China.
They are a big part of the problem in the first place.
[+] [-] nxc18|4 years ago|reply
The experience is probably the digital equivalent of hitting rock bottom, but it does shame me into stopping and is probably good for my mental health overall.
I can’t imagine a western company doing that for their customers. Can you imagine Facebook actively trying to get you to spend less time on their platform? The closest is Netflix “are you still there?” but they’re just trying to save bandwidth.
Edit: https://www.tiktok.com/@tiktoktips/video/6781608404646464774
[+] [-] gentleman11|4 years ago|reply
It still falls under the celebrated American umbrella of using ai to manipulate peoples behaviour and thinking
[+] [-] monsieurbanana|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Closi|4 years ago|reply
This move won’t be done from the kindness of their heart and to get kids to reduce gaming consumption - it will be a move they have been instructed to do from the Chinese government.
These companies can’t really push back either - if you want an example see what happened to Jack Ma.
[+] [-] softwaredoug|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] rowanG077|4 years ago|reply
It won't take long at this rate until it's completely normal for the software of big companies deciding what you can and can't do at all times during the day.
[+] [-] nirui|4 years ago|reply
> a time-sensitive facial recognition ... linked with big data from the central public security system ... "We will conduct a face screening for accounts registered with real names and that have played for a certain period of time at night" ... Facial recognition is a welcome sign
So here is the image in my head: A man, Mr Zhao, 35 years old, just finished showering, half naked, lying on his bed, playing a Tencent game before sleep. Then, all of a sudden, a pop up showed up, "To protect the flowers of our bright future, please verify you are you, Mr Zhao".
Now, think what Mr Zhao would do? Get all dressed up, lights on and fully prepared for the "Verification Interview" with the AI (and maybe a night shift worker at Tencent too)? Nah... Probably not.
Hahaha! Poor Mr Zhao, been forced to take a "bed photo", right?
Well, it's funny to think until you realized a 8 years old could also lying on his bed a play Tencent game on parents phone before sleep.
And what Tencent want to do? Capture optical data and possibly send it to multiple storage and processing sites over the Internet?
Yeah, great idea, way to go boy!
My final point: I use few Tencent products and I know a lots of smart engineers in Tencent. But been their user, I often just can't understand how can they design their product so wrong. This facial recognition powered "Child Predator" can be an example of that -- High tech? Yes; Very wrong? Yes.
Could Tencent please put their talents to good use instead of build something brain-dead like this one?
[+] [-] underseacables|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] markus_zhang|4 years ago|reply
And it's everywhere.
[+] [-] Negitivefrags|4 years ago|reply
I suspect that on this forum there would be a mix of opinion about if that is a good idea or not. I mean, personally I think it should be up to parents to manage this, but I can totally see how some would have the opposite opinion about it. I don't think it's totally out of bounds as a concept for government to regulate this.
I have seen plenty of people calling for laws regulating mystery boxes for example on this very forum, and you could have the exact same parental responsibility argument there too.
The main difference is that in the US, were such a law passed, then tech companies would do some minimum amount of compliance such as requiring that you send a picture of ID or some such and then call it done. If minors manage to get around that by getting photos of their parents ID, well, what is a company to do?
In China the government doesn't care about your excuses. Children are playing your game anyway? Well, we are shutting you down then.
The result is this kind of thing.
[+] [-] bigmattystyles|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|4 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] losvedir|4 years ago|reply
In the US there are frequent stories about how ML works well on white men, but not, e.g., African Americans and I think Asian Americans. There was that Twitter spat between Timnit Gebru and Andrej Karpathy about this subject, and whether it's "just" training data or inherent in ML, partly because of who runs the analyses and who the wealthy consumers are, etc. Having trained some models and fiddled with hyperparameters myself, I could see the argument that it's a little more than just the training data; for example, how the algorithm uses contrast or what kind of angles it picks up.
But what I'm curious about is how well this system works here, developed by a Chinese company with Chinese developers for primarily Chinese users. Does it have better accuracy than Google on the same Chinese data set? Does it have worse accuracy on white people than Google?
I imagine the data is not out there, but maybe there's some published research along these lines by Tencent, or others comparing algorithms or models trained on Tencent data sets to the western equivalents?
[+] [-] x081ia2939|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] rdiddly|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] optymizer|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] brookmg|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] xg15|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] allochthon|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|4 years ago|reply
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