de Seta Gabriele, Shchetvina Anya
Department of Linguistic, Literary and Aesthetic Studies, University of Bergen, Bergen, Norway.
GRK "Kleine Formen", Humboldt University, Berlin, Germany.
AI Soc. 2024;39(5):2267-2284. doi: 10.1007/s00146-023-01733-x. Epub 2023 Aug 1.
Machine vision is one of the main applications of artificial intelligence. In China, the machine vision industry makes up more than a third of the national AI market, and technologies like face recognition, object tracking and automated driving play a central role in surveillance systems and social governance projects relying on the large-scale collection and processing of sensor data. Like other novel articulations of technology and society, machine vision is defined, developed and explained by different actors through the work of imagination. In this article, we draw on the concept of sociotechnical imaginaries to understand how Chinese companies represent machine vision. Through a qualitative multimodal analysis of the corporate websites of leading industry players, we identify a cohesive sociotechnical imaginary of machine vision, and explain how four distinct visual registers contribute to its articulation. These four registers, which we call , , , and , allow Chinese tech companies to articulate their global ambitions and competitiveness through narrow and opaque representations of machine vision technologies.
机器视觉是人工智能的主要应用之一。在中国，机器视觉产业占全国人工智能市场的三分之一以上，人脸识别、目标跟踪和自动驾驶等技术在依赖大规模传感器数据收集和处理的监控系统及社会治理项目中发挥着核心作用。与其他技术与社会的新表述一样，机器视觉由不同行为者通过想象工作来定义、发展和阐释。在本文中，我们借鉴社会技术想象的概念来理解中国公司如何呈现机器视觉。通过对行业领军企业公司网站的定性多模态分析，我们识别出一种连贯的机器视觉社会技术想象，并解释四种不同的视觉语域如何促成其表述。这四种语域，我们称之为[此处原文缺失四种语域的具体名称]，使中国科技公司能够通过对机器视觉技术狭隘且不透明的表述来阐明其全球抱负和竞争力。
