5 ms·
Racial bias in Zoom's and Twitter's algorithms erase black faces
- notadog 6y agoRelated Wired and NY Times articles linked further down the Twitter thread: https://www.wired.com/story/best-algorithms-struggle-recognize-black-faces-equally/ https://www.wired.com/story/best-algorithms-struggle-recogni... and https://www.nytimes.com/2020/06/24/technology/facial-recognition-arrest.html https://www.nytimes.com/2020/06/24/technology/facial-recogni...
- overboard2 6y agoOh no, you're telling me that reduced contrast impairs facial recognition algorithms? This is clearly racist.
- rpier001 6y agoYeah. It kind of is. If we trained as much for black faces as white faces, the algorithms would be better. Moreover, the background contrast for white faces is frequently worse (against backgrounds of white walls).
- rbecker 6y ago> If we trained as much for black faces as white faces Doesn't Zoom have a large part of their employee base in China, and their US CEO is a Chinese immigrant? So perhaps you should replace "white" with "Asian"?
- aardshark 6y agoIs that second part really true, or are you conjecturing? I would have thought that even the whitest people have more of a pinkish hue to their skin.
- bsanr2 6y agoMelanin increases the relative specularity of skin so I'm jot sure what you mean by this.
- rpier001 6y agoThere is also the question of what constitutes 'racist'. In earlier times the threshold/definition included malicious intent. In 2020 more people, myself included, are prone to include cases of benign neglect/inattention.
- Guthur 6y agoIt's not racist and to say as such is just stupid. The model might be a poor but it has no concept of race. And actually think implying that the authors of the algo and model are racist equally stupid.
- chapium 6y agoI thought he was being cheeky to be honest.
- notadog 6y agoWhile I doubt that this was the intent of the programmers responsible, it doesn't change the fact that people are being discriminated against because of their skin color.
- neilsense 6y agoThis is not racial discrimination, it's a bug with a piece of software. There are many bugs with software, because behind it are human beings that are being pressured in many ways to ship said software. Behind all of this is a pretty badly tested library that someone took off GitHub and dumped into Zoom. There is no ill-intent. If we consider every little thing as racism, we remove the weight of the word and what it actually should be used for. The end of that road being that everyone cries racism for everything and we all become indifferent to hearing the term.
- dwaltrip 6y agoIt’s more than a simple bug. It’s a design flaw that results in mistreatment for people of certain skin colors. You are likely correct that the intent was not malicious. This is no excuse. Throughout history, everyone believes they are doing the right thing or are properly justified, even when heinous acts are being committed. We are master story tellers, and we tell the most twisted stories to ourselves. At the end of the day, the impact that our actions have matters a lot more than our best intentions.
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- chapium 6y agoIts easy to criticize this crappy, trash, algorithm. Before one declares something trash, they had better have an alternative that fits the use case.
- smt88 6y agoThe alternative is not to do it. Companies that produce these algorithms have said not to deploy them against people. You don't need to have something better in mind to criticize something. Criticism alone can be useful if the endeavor didn't need to be attempted at all.
- bsanr2 6y agoWe can do so much better than this Racist algorithms, and faces that we miss