The Automation of Empathy

Trevor Paglen's print Machine Readable Hito (2017) is composed of hundreds of images of artist Hito Steyerl's face. Each image has Steyerl making a different facial expression, and each is captioned with the output of computational algorithms designed to detect age, gender, or emotion. The captions in Machine Readable Hito are similar to those generated by software developed by Microsoft--a suite of programs formerly called Project Oxford, which are now part of the Microsoft Azure machine-learning platform. Along with a range of programs designed to match faces and identify age, gender, and emotion, Microsoft Azure includes algorithms that can recognize voices, engage in real-time language translation, and perform content moderation--the automated identification and removal of pornographic images and videos, for instance.