Empowerment or warfare? dark skin, AI camera, and Transsion’s patent narratives

ABSTRACT

Through document analysis and interviews, this paper examines the patent narratives of Transsion, a Chinese company dominating Africa’s smartphone market and a leading innovator in facial recognition technologies (FRTs) optimized for darker skin tones. We identify two major narratives concerning Transsion’s FRT patenting practice. First is ‘empowerment’, through which Transsion argues that there are ‘blind spots’ in conventional AI technologies and presents its AI camera as a remedy and an empowerment tool for dark-skinned users by ‘seeing’ their beauty. Second is the ‘warfare’ narrative, which is shaped by the heightening market competition and accelerating patent races among Chinese phone makers. As the battle for tech supremacy intensifies in Africa, Transsion expresses a strong sense of crisis and considers its FRT patents as ‘weapons of competition’ in preparation for a future smartphone warfare in Africa. This study makes two contributions. Empirically, through analyzing patents, we examine a relatively less-known Chinese tech company that has tremendous impact in the Global South. Theoretically, we interrogate the possibility of algorithmic empowerment against racist AI and technological independence through patents, although developing AI as weaponry, in the China-Africa context, also hampers the politics of decolonization.

KEYWORDS:

• AI (artificial intelligence)
• facial recognition technologies
• patent
• dark skin
• Africa
• China

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 Patent trolls refer to patent owners whose primary business is collecting money from others that allegedly infringe their patents.

2 This includes ‘Shanghai Chuanying Limited’, ‘Shanghai Zhanyang Limited’, ‘Shenzhen Transsion Communication Limited’, ‘Shenzhen Tainuoheng Limited’, ‘Shenzhen Transsion Manufacture Limited’, and ‘Chongqing Transsion Limited ’.

3 The lead author informed Transsion of her future research intention, received no salary from this internship, and conducted most interviews after work or leaving this company.

4 For full texts, see: http://data.eastmoney.com/notices/stock/688036.html

5 See Tecno’s official website: https://www.tecno-mobile.com/phones/product-detail/product/camon-18-premier/#/

6 See Transsion’s official website: https://www.transsion.com/about?lang=zh&code=about.about

7 For details, see: http://static.sse.com.cn/disclosure/listedinfo/bulletin/star/c/688036_20200428_2.pdf and https://bit.ly/3GrDXf5.

8 For examples, see: https://bit.ly/3CoPg5a and https://bit.ly/3bhk6AY

9 The first four columns of this table are based on our analysis of Transsion’s patent documents. Statistics in the other three columns are calculated based on Transsion’s 2020 annual report.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Miao Lu

Miao Lu is a Postdoctoral Fellow in the School of Journalism and Communication at the Chinese University of Hong Kong (CUHK). She obtained her PhD in Communication from CUHK (2020). Her research resides at the intersection of critical media studies, STS, and ICT4D. Her dissertation is an ethnographic study of a Chinese phone company in Ghana. Her current research projects investigate China’s tech rise in the Global South, especially in Africa.

Jack Linchuan Qiu

Jack Linchuan Qiu is a Professor in the Department of Communications and New Media, National University of Singapore. He works on issues of digital media and social change in relation to labor, class, globalization, and sustainability, especially in the contexts of Asia and the Global South. He has published more than 100 research articles and chapters and 10 books in both English and Chinese including Goodbye iSlave: A Manifesto for Digital Abolition (U of Illinois Press, 2016) and Working-Class Network Society (MIT Press, 2009).