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Alternative take: Computers can most easily pick out facial features when there is significant color contrast, shadows cast on white skin create greater contra
by HideousKojima 6y ago
Alternative take:
Computers can most easily pick out facial features when there is significant color contrast, shadows cast on white skin create greater contrast than it can with darker skin, and the systems end up inherently working better on people with lighter skin due to basic math and physics.
Why hasn't some company out there designed a powerful system that works well with darker skinned people? It would be trumpeted by the tech press all over if they did, instead we just see articles about companies like Google manually tweaking the outcomes to appease the people complaining about racism.
- nerdponx 6y agoA system that works poorly on dark-skinned people would be a nonstarter in most parts of Africa and South Asia. But in North America it's hailed as highly successful and put into production, despite some 44 million US citizens being Black or African, with demographic concentrations as high as 70-80% in some cities.
- HideousKojima 6y agoFrom looking at articles that actually give hard numbers, misidentification for minorities is something like 5 to 10 times more common, with a 1 in 1000 error rate for black women for example: https://www.wired.com/story/best-algorithms-struggle-recognize-black-faces-equally/ https://www.wired.com/story/best-algorithms-struggle-recogni... Being able to identify 999 out of 1,000 black women accurately is highly successful. Just because it gets 9,999 out of 10,000 on white women doesn't make 999 out of 1,000 a failure. Mind you I'm opposed to the tech in general because it will inevitably be used to create dystopian hellholes. But not because I falsely correlate different error margins for different races with "structural racism."