In the two French parliamentary hemicycles, the National Assembly and the Senate, representatives make and break the laws of France. Two tasks, which at first glance, seem to require total concentration. Yet it is quite possible to see deputies or senators using their smartphones during a plenary session while one or more people are speaking. In Belgium, the problem is similar in the Flemish government, and to remedy this, an artificial intelligence called “Flemish Scrollers” is working to prevent this.

A digital artist behind this tool for “monitoring” MPs

Flemish Scrollers is the idea of Dries Depoorter, a digital artist living in Ghent, Belgium, who uses all the specifics of technological, digital, computer devices, etc. to create a work of art with humorous appeal. Dries Depoorter creates works about surveillance, privacy, social media and machine learning.

He started with an observation: every meeting of the Flemish government in Belgium is broadcast live on YouTube. A “godsend” for the technology expert who sees the possibility of exploiting the images as data for a tool that is surprising, to say the least: it repeats and identifies members of the government who are distracted by their smartphone.

This project comes almost two years after the controversy surrounding Flemish Minister-President Jan Jambon. He was playing the famous video game Angry Birds during an important political discussion, which provoked strong reactions from the Belgian public.

A tool that uses machine learning to operate

The Flemish Scrollers software is coded in Python and uses machine learning to detect phones and facial recognition to identify the politician. The software started running on July 5, 2021, and scans live video of Belgian government plenary sessions in Flanders. If there is no live meeting, the software will check old videos uploaded to the YouTube channel to see if in the past someone has been distracted by their phone.

The app also has a Twitter account @FlemishScroller and an Instagram account @TheFlemishScrollers on which government officials targeted by the machine learning-enabled tool are posted and identified. Thus, Jan Jambon was once again targeted by Flemish Scrollers, as was Ben Weyts, Flemish Vice-Minister-President and Flemish Minister for Education, Animal Welfare and Sport.

Amongst other tools/digital artworks, Dries Depoorter proposed his chat application “Die with me”, which can be used as soon as the battery of one’s phone is at less than 5%, or the device “ShortLife” which indicates approximately the percentage of life already lived according to one’s personal life expectancy.

Translated from Un artiste numérique utilise le machine learning pour identifier les politiciens distraits par leur smartphone