Algorithm Bias in Beauty Contests
September 16, 2016
I don’t read about beauty contests. In my college dorm, I recall that the televised broadcast of the Miss America pageant was popular among some of the residents. I used the attention grabber as my cue to head to the library so I could hide reserved books from my classmates. Every little bit helps in the dog eat dog world of academic achievement.
“When Artificial Intelligence Judges a Beauty Contest, White People Win” surprised me. I thought that algorithms were objective little numerical recipes. Who could fiddle 1=1=2?
I learned:
The foundation of machine learning is data gathered by humans, and without careful consideration, the machines learn the same biases of their creators. Sometimes bias is difficult to track, but other times it’s clear as the nose on someone’s face—like when it’s a face the algorithm is trying to process and judge.
Its seems that an algorithm likes white people. The write up informed me:
An online beauty contest called Beauty.ai, run byYouth Laboratories (that lists big names in tech like Nvidia and Microsoft as “partners and supporters” on the contest website), solicited 600,000 entries by saying they would be graded by artificial intelligence. The algorithm would look at wrinkles, face symmetry, amount of pimples and blemishes, race, and perceived age. However, race seemed to play a larger role than intended; of the 44 winners, 36 were white.
Oh, oh. Microsoft and its smart software seem to play a role in this drama.
What’s the fix? Better data. The write up includes this statement from a Microsoft expert:
“If a system is trained on photos of people who are overwhelmingly white, it will have a harder time recognizing non-white faces,” writes Kate Crawford, principal researcher at Microsoft Research New York City, in a New York Times op-ed. “So inclusivity matters—from who designs it to who sits on the company boards and which ethical perspectives are included. Otherwise, we risk constructing machine intelligence that mirrors a narrow and privileged vision of society, with its old, familiar biases and stereotypes.”
In the last few months, Microsoft’s folks were involved in Tay, a chatbot which allegedly learned to be racist. Then there was the translation of “Daesh” as Saudi Arabia. Now algorithms appear to favor folks of a particular stripe.
Exciting math. But Microsoft has also managed to gum up webcams and Kindle access in Windows 10. Yep, the new Microsoft is a sparkling example of smart.
Stephen E Arnold, September 16, 2016
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