In 2023, a group of AI researchers, including Ria Kalluri at Stanford University, William Agnew from the University of Washington, and Abeba Birhane from the Mozilla Foundation, would analyze more than forty thousand computer-vision papers and patents, and note the pervasive use of abstract, detached language to sanitize and normalize the field’s reliance upon mass scraping and extraction. Detailed digital trails of people’s thoughts and ideas on social media were merely “text.” People and vehicles in pictures were merely “objects.” Surveillance was merely “detection.”
