The Surveillance AI Pipeline

A rapidly growing number of voices have argued that AI research, and computer vision in particular, is closely tied to mass surveillance. Yet the direct path from computer vision research to surveillance has remained obscured and difficult to assess. This study reveals the Surveillance AI pipeline. We obtain three decades of computer vision research papers and downstream patents (more than 20,000 documents) and present a rich qualitative and quantitative analysis. This analysis exposes the nature and extent of the Surveillance AI pipeline, its institutional roots and evolution, and ongoing patterns of obfuscation. We first perform an in-depth content analysis of computer vision papers and downstream patents, identifying and quantifying key features and the many, often subtly expressed, forms of surveillance that appear. On the basis of this analysis, we present a topology of Surveillance AI that characterizes the prevalent targeting of human data, practices of data transferal, and institutional data use. We find stark evidence of close ties between computer vision and surveillance. The majority (68%) of annotated computer vision papers and patents self-report their technology enables data extraction about human bodies and body parts and even more (90%) enable data extraction about humans in general.