  Two art exhibitions, "Training Humans" and "Making Faces," and the
accompanying essay "Excavating AI: The politics of images in machine learning
training sets" by Kate Crawford and Trevor Paglen, are making substantial
impact on discourse taking place in the social and mass media networks, and
some scholarly circles. Critical scrutiny reveals, however, a
self-contradictory stance regarding informed consent for the use of facial
images, as well as serious flaws in their critique of ML training sets. Our
analysis underlines the non-negotiability of informed consent when using human
data in artistic and other contexts, and clarifies issues relating to the
description of ML training sets.
