TITLE: "Excavating AI" Re-excavated: Debunking a Fallacious Account of the JAFFE Dataset 

ABSTRACT: Twenty-five years ago, my colleagues Miyuki Kamachi and Jiro Gyoba and I
designed and photographed JAFFE, a set of facial expression images intended for
use in a study of face perception. In 2019, without seeking permission or
informing us, Kate Crawford and Trevor Paglen exhibited JAFFE in two widely
publicized art shows. In addition, they published a nonfactual account of the
images in the essay "Excavating AI: The Politics of Images in Machine Learning
Training Sets." The present article recounts the creation of the JAFFE dataset
and unravels each of Crawford and Paglen's fallacious statements. I also
discuss JAFFE more broadly in connection with research on facial expression,
affective computing, and human-computer interaction.
Twenty-five years ago, my colleagues Miyuki Kamachi and Jiro Gyoba and I
designed and photographed JAFFE, a set of facial expression images intended for
use in a study of face perception. In 2019, without seeking permission or
informing us, Kate Crawford and Trevor Paglen exhibited JAFFE in two widely
publicized art shows. In addition, they published a nonfactual account of the
images in the essay "Excavating AI: The Politics of Images in Machine Learning
Training Sets." The present article recounts the creation of the JAFFE dataset
and unravels each of Crawford and Paglen's fallacious statements. I also
discuss JAFFE more broadly in connection with research on facial expression,
affective computing, and human-computer interaction.
"Excavating AI" Re-excavated: Debunking a Fallacious Account of the JAFFE Dataset
http://arxiv.org/abs/2107.13998v1