Prettiness algorithms: Smartphones and the manipulation of taste

Often branded as ‘visual AI’, machine vision is the software technology that allows computers to see the world by interpreting images — used in social media platforms (identifying people in photographs), driverless cars (recognising pedestrians or road signs) and many more sinister applications. Researchers, journalists and activists have found that machine vision systems are biased in many of the same ways as the cultures that produced them. Starting from John Berger’s seminal Marxist analysis of how our culture informs the way we see, this article looks at some of the subtlest types of bias in machine vision systems: the automatic ‘enhancement’ of photos by smartphone cameras.