Facial Recognition for a Certain Type of Bro
April 11, 2018
Male white privilege is a topic that pervades social and cultural discourse, but according to The Seattle Times the bias exists in facial recognition technology, “Facial-Recognition Technology Works Best If You’re A White Guy, Study Says.” AI’s ability to recognize people is improving more and more each day. The technology’s developers improve the technology by feeding AI data that help it learn to discern between physical differences such as gender, skin color, facial features, and other traits. It seems, however, that the data groups are overwrought with white men.
Apparently facial recognition software is 99 percent accurate in identifying white men, but the darker a person’s skin is the more errors that arise. MIT researcher Joy Buolamwini discovered the disparities and said it was a reflection of real word biases. The AI is only as smart as the people that program it:
“In modern artificial intelligence, data rules. AI software is only as smart as the data used to train it. If there are many more white men than black women in the system, it will be worse at identifying the black women. One widely used facial recognition data set was estimated to be more than 75 percent male and more than 80 percent white, according to another research study.”
Another alarming factor is that facial recognition and related technologies have a high adoption rate, such as companies that use them to target social media ads and automated decisions such as hiring people and money lending. Do not forget that law enforcement officials are relying more on the technology and minorities are more likely to singled out in databases.
While this information is disparaging, it makes a bigger issue out of something that can be easily remedied. Yes, the data is skewed towards white males, because, based on statistics, more white men work in the technology field so they draw on data they have ready access to. It is the same with the genetics field, European and Asian genes are more accurately represented than African DNA, because these countries are more developed than the mother continent. To resolve this conundrum, they need to start feeding facial recognition technology data with more females and people with darker skin. It is probably not that hard to find the data, just visit social media or an image library, then download away.
Whitney Grace, April 11, 2018
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