This Just In: AI Machines Are Racists, Too

I suspect the programmers:

The first international beauty contest judged by “machines” was supposed to use objective factors such as facial symmetry and wrinkles to identify the most attractive contestants. After Beauty.AI launched this year, roughly 6,000 people from more than 100 countries submitted photos in the hopes that artificial intelligence, supported by complex algorithms, would determine that their faces most closely resembled “human beauty”.

But when the results came in, the creators were dismayed to see that there was a glaring factor linking the winners: the robots did not like people with dark skin.

Out of 44 winners, nearly all were white, a handful were Asian, and only one had dark skin. That’s despite the fact that, although the majority of contestants were white, many people of color submitted photos, including large groups from India and Africa. The ensuing controversy has sparked renewed debates about the ways in which algorithms can perpetuate biases, yielding unintended and often offensive results.

Time to stand down on AI — artificial intelligence — research, because feelings:

While the seemingly racist beauty pageant has prompted jokes and mockery, computer science experts and social justice advocates say that in other industries and arenas, the growing use of prejudiced AI systems is no laughing matter. In some cases, it can have devastating consequences for people of color.

Beauty.AI – which was created by a “deep learning” group called Youth Laboratories and supported by Microsoft – relied on large datasets of photos to build an algorithm that assessed beauty. While there are a number of reasons why the algorithm favored white people, the main problem was that the data the project used to establish standards of attractiveness did not include enough minorities, said Alex Zhavoronkov, Beauty.AI’s chief science officer.

Although the group did not build the algorithm to treat light skin as a sign of beauty, the input data effectively led the robot judges to reach that conclusion.

Some pictures of the female winners at the link. Your results may vary.