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Springer Nature retracts nearly 40 publications that trained neural networks on dataset containing images of children’s faces downloaded from websites about autism (www.thetransmitter.org)
submitted 11 months ago by to c/science@beehaw.org
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[–] 22 points 11 months ago (7 children)

This is disgusting, especially in this moment I am honestly repulsed someone would look for a way to visually target and identify autistic people, there is no kind reason to seek this capability when so many people desire to hurt autistic people.

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  • [–] 12 points 11 months ago (5 children)

    @supersquirrel @spit_evil_olive_tips Idk about stupid.It's the direct consequence of having and collecting a bunch of data. Being able to come up with any idea, throw it against the wall and see what sticks was the entire point in the first place. Having almost all of them fail to find the ones that don't was the point of the setup.This kind of use is also the reason why anyone who ever warned about data collection warned about it.

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  • [–] 9 points 11 months ago (4 children)

    My point is if someone handed me a tool that could decisively identify autistic kids from photographs I would destroy it if possible and then and advocate for parents never uploading photos of their autistic kids to the internet.

    There are people in power who would immediately use this tool to do evil things, to seek to create it makes it clear the creators clearly don't give a shit about any other goal than "I figured something out!" in their research.

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  • [–] 5 points 11 months ago (1 child)

    This tool wouldn't work very well either. Ignoring the problems of collecting and verifying the validity of the data (and those are pretty big, serious problems), 2,900 images isn't really enough to train an accurate image classifier. Especially not one that I would be comfortable using in a medical context.

    Using the tool would probably result in a ton of false positives, and I'd bet the model would be overfitted to its data. Of course, I don't think that would prevent people from using something like that nefariously.

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  • [–] 2 points 11 months ago

    It also wouldn't work well because it's impossible to diagnose someone with Autism solely from their face. They'd have much better luck making a tool for something like Down syndrome, but even still it would be very fallible.

    Autism is widely called "invisible" for a reason lol.

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  • [–] 5 points 11 months ago (1 child)

    The best current treatments for autism depend on knowing as early as possible that a child needs specialized help to have the best outcomes. If there was a tool that decisively identified autistic kids and you destroyed it I would rank you as a particularly heinous monster.

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  • [–] 1 point 11 months ago

    This depends on how the tool is used still. For someone seeking a diagnosis, the tool would be incredible. For someone who wants to use it to discriminate, the tool would be terrible.

    Like most tools, the tool itself isn't morally right or wrong. It's the use of the tool that is.

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  • [–] 2 points 11 months ago

    While I agree that especially in this moment this is a terrible idea, and the collection process is idiotic and reprehensible, in a better society it might be helpful if it were actually a successful tool. Autism is a spectrum and a somewhat vague collection of behavioral traits and plenty of children grow up without a diagnosis causing lots of undue pain and stress. Plenty of them may learn to mask on their own, but imho it would be great to be able to catch it early and give them tools that might help them succeed and give their family more understanding of them as individuals. Again, I don't think this is a good idea, but I can see how a well meaning person might have come up with this.

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