CyberAlliance Seminar: Professor Allison McDonald, Boston University

Speaker: Allison McDonald, Assistant Professor of Computing & Data Sciences, Boston University

Talk Title: Ethical Challenges and Opportunities for AI/ML Research using Nude Images”

Abstract: Nudity detection and safety filtering algorithms are widely used to identify content that violates platform policies and to find sexual abuse content. An increasing number of academic research teams, non-profit and for-profit organizations, as well as commercial platforms, have been working to improve nudity detection algorithms and other computer vision-based systems. For training, testing, and benchmarking nudity detection algorithms, researchers typically scrape explicit images from the internet or use existing datasets of nude images. While this practice is common for assembling datasets for general image-recognition tasks, nude image datasets are particularly sensitive and highly likely to contain abuse content of both adults and children, meaning practitioners risk engaging in the same abuse their tools attempt to prevent. This talk will describe our empirical investigation into how datasets of nude and explicit content are currently used in research and will explore paths forward that enable essential research while minimizing harm.

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