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Of course, we’ve all glanced at our phones in boring meetings. But if you’re working for the taxpayer’s penny, you better be prepared for artificial intelligence to call you out for looking in the black mirror of the legislature when you should, you know, legislate.
This is what digital artist Dries Depoorter did for his latest installation “The Flemish Scrollers”. Its software which uses facial recognition to automatically call politicians in the Flemish province of Belgium who are distracted by their phones when its parliament is in session. The project comes almost two years after Flemish Minister-President Jan Jambon sparked public outrage after playing angry Birds during a political discussion. (Really.)
Launched on Monday, Depoorter’s system monitors daily live broadcasts of government meetings on YouTube to gauge how long a representative has been watching their phone compared to the current meeting. If the AI detects a distracted person, it will publicly identify the party by posting the clip – on Instagram @TheFlemishScrollers and Twitter @FlemishScroller.
The accused representative will be named and humiliated with his social media handles. The bot also politely asks that they “stay focused please!”
According to the Depoorter website, if there is no current session, the software will start analyzing and learning from the archived live streams. Whether this means the software will regularly display evidence of past distraction was unclear. Depoorter did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Less than 24 hours after The Flemish Scrollers went live, the program has already identified four cases of politicians concerned about their phones and sparked discussion among growing social media about the software.
As some followers have pointed out, the software’s tendency to jump to conclusions could be a problem. After all, we cannot know what these politicians were doing on their devices; There are times when useful and important work needs to be done urgently, even if it’s on the same device everyone is using to waste time.
Until AI software starts to read phones off the shoulders of lawmakers, then we’ll just have to believe that being watched by a bot can help politicians cut back. angry Birds time.
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