At a time when the?AI boom?has taken over the world and?startups?are rapidly building their businesses around it, one of them has gone a step further.?Given that AI's software enables people¡¯s photos to be instantly matched to online images and digital profiles,?a startup is doing that to help the US government?in more ways than one.
Clearview AI, a secretive AI?startup, was founded in 2017. It is an American facial recognition company that provides software to law enforcement, government agencies, and other organizations. The company's algorithm matches faces to a database of billions of images collected from the Internet.?
The AI startup's aim is to drastically reduce crime, fraud, and risk, create safer communities, ensure secure commerce, and enhance our national security and military defence.
At the age of 19, the startup's co-founder, Hoan Ton-That, an Australian university dropout, had moved to Silicon Valley. He built a video-streaming site that automatically emailed marketing material to users¡¯ contacts. He then moved to New York, where he met Richard Schwartz, who had worked as an adviser to Rudy Giuliani, the former mayor of New York. The pair hit it off and founded Clearview?AI.?
Along the way, they were helped by a cast of right-wing characters, such as Peter Thiel, who put money in Clearview,as per The Economist report.
Venture capitalists were given free trials?as Clearview wooed them. Clearview found most success with law enforcement. Police teams often had databases of mugshots, which only contained people who had been arrested. The app helped investigators match faces from surveillance footage with online profiles. By mid-2019, more than 200 law-enforcement agencies had used the tool, including the FBI and counterparts abroad. Among police, the app became a verb. ¡°We Clearviewed the guy and then passed the information along to the right unit,¡± an officer said.
Mostly, the app is highly accurate. But misidentification has also led to wrongful arrests. This problem is most prevalent?among minorities, who are underrepresented in the databases used to teach the algorithm how to match faces.
Now it remains to be seen if and how the startup is able to get more precise identifications.
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In March 2022,?Ukraine's defence ministry began using Clearview AI¡¯s facial recognition technology, the company's CEO said, as per a Reuters report. This came after the U.S. startup offered to uncover Russian assailants, combat misinformation, and identify the dead.
Ukraine was said to be receiving free access to Clearview AI¡¯s powerful search engine for faces, letting authorities potentially vet people of interest at checkpoints, among other uses, according to Lee Wolosky, an adviser to Clearview and former diplomat under U.S. presidents Barack Obama and Joe Biden.??
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