I am totally in favor of criticizing researchers for doing science that actually serves corporate interests. I wrote a whole thing doing that just last week. I actually fully agree with the main point made by the researchers here, that people in fields like machine vision are often unwilling to grapple with the real-word impacts of their work, but I think complaining that they use the word “object” for humans is distracting, and a bit of a misfire. “Object detection” is just the term of art for recognizing anything, humans included, and of course humans are the object that interests us most. It’s a bit like complaining that I objectified humans by calling them a “thing” when I included humans in “anything” in my previous sentence.

Again, I fully agree with much of their main thesis. This is a really important point:

As co-author Luca Soldaini said on a call with 404 Media, even in the seemingly benign context of computer vision enabled cameras on self-driving cars, which are ostensibly there to detect and prevent collision with human beings, computer vision is often eventually used for surveillance.

“The way I see it is that even benign applications like that, because data that involves humans is collected by an automatic car, even if you’re doing this for object detection, you’re gonna have images of humans, of pedestrians, or people inside the car—in practice collecting data from folks without their consent.” Soldaini said.

Soldaini also pointed to instances when this data was eventually used for surveillance, like police requesting self-driving car footage for video evidence.

And I do agree that sometimes, it’s wise to update our language to be more respectful, but I’m not convinced that in this instance it’s the smoking gun they’re portraying it as. The structures that make this technology evil here are very well understood, and they matter much more than the fairly banal language we’re using to describe the tech.