If you rode the metro in the Brazilian city of Sao Paulo in 2018, you might have come across a new kind of advertising. Glowing interactive doors featured content targeted at individuals, according to assumptions made by artificial intelligence based on their appearance. Fitted with facial recognition cameras, the screens made instantaneous decisions about passengers’ gender, age and emotional state, then served them ads accordingly.
“We want to carve out a path in artificial intelligence that’s not the Chinese or the U.S. laissez-faire one, but one that’s based on human rights,” said Daniel Leufer, a Europe Policy analyst at the digital rights group Access Now. Giggle’s CEO Sall Grover told me that the app was moderated by humans who “watch behind the screens at all times to ensure that Giggle remains a female space,” adding that “there are apps specifically for gay men or specifically for transgender people and we support them.”
Automated gender recognition is yet another tool, activists say, to reinforce fixed notions of gender and the stereotypes and biases that accompany them. The technology itself “works very badly for trans people and it doesn’t work at all for non-binary people,” said Yuri Guaiana of All Out, an international LGBTQ+ Advocacy group that is campaigning for the ban.