5 ms·

> In study 2, beautifying filters increased the hireability only slightly for White female applicants, followed by White and Black male applicants but substanti

by mdoms 4y ago

> In study 2, beautifying filters increased the hireability only slightly for White female applicants, followed by White and Black male applicants but substantially for Black female applicants It's a gross thing to consider but I wonder if the filter lightened the skin of black female applicants. These results are disappointing but unfortunately not surprising.

ErikVandeWater 4y ago
I wonder if in predominantly black countries, darkening the skin tones of white applicants would be considered beautifying.
- dwater 4y ago
  Generally, European colonizers imported their anti-dark skin biases (colourism) to their African colonies and they persist to this day among the black populations. https://www.e-ir.info/2020/04/11/critical-reflections-on-ethnicity-and-colourism-in-africa-and-the-diaspora/ https://www.e-ir.info/2020/04/11/critical-reflections-on-eth...
  - thaumasiotes 4y ago
    > and they persist to this day among the black populations. Well, light skin preference for females persists to this day in African populations and every other population. It was also present -- and documented even in Africa -- before any European presence existed, so it's strange to say that Europeans imported it. And darker skin is usually preferred for men.
    - rajin444 4y ago
      I'm not sure how to account for darker skin _may_ be less attractive to humans on a genetic level. It's a question science can't answer, so I don't know how we could control for it. i.e, it could be the truth that the lighter your skin is the more attractive you are. How do we rule that out?
      - thaumasiotes 4y ago
        >> darker skin is usually preferred for men.
    - deleted 4y ago
      [deleted]
    - deleted 4y ago
      [deleted]
    - dagaci 4y ago
      Zooming out, you should understand than African's have darker skin generally because they literally selected for that preference and those men had more wives and more descendants for those choices, the reverse is true for Europe. These choices of course being influenced by other factors but the point is an example that it is always important to articulate the forest as well as the trees.
    - autoexec 4y ago
      > It was also present -- and documented even in Africa Do you have a source for that? I'm not disagreeing, only curious.
      - thaumasiotes 4y ago
        Peter Frost writes a lot about this. Here are two (heavily overlapping) articles: https://evoandproud.blogspot.com/2006/12/skin-color-preference-in-sub-saharan.html https://evoandproud.blogspot.com/2006/12/skin-color-preferen... https://evoandproud.blogspot.com/2013/08/perception-of-skin-color-in-sub-saharan.html https://evoandproud.blogspot.com/2013/08/perception-of-skin-... Another observation he's made is that black children are born light and darken, with a noticeable sex difference: - Black males darken until eventually they reach adult darkness. - Black females darken until puberty, at which point they are darker than they will be as adults. One of the changes they experience during puberty is a lightening of their skin.
BoorishBears 4y ago
I remember stumbling across a "beauty rating" site that had an ML model trained to rate photos on beauty. At the risk of sounding conceited, when it gave me (black male) a bad score, I knew something had to be wrong. I went and searched for photos of famous black males generally accepted as attractive and noticed it also gave them poor scores. That gave me a hunch about what was going on, and lo and behold: taking the same exact photos, but processed to black and white and brightened, resulted in extremely high scores. The model was essentially measuring how light your skin is.
- HarryHirsch 4y ago
  ML models are... very local. They fail at sensemaking. If it's any comfort, the same model would probably identify President Mobutu as a leopard.
- tempnow987 4y ago
  There are some studies I believe that show even attractive african american women can have trouble with low click through / match / rating on dating sites. So if the model was trained on who folks wanted to date (as a measure of attractiveness) the model could still be somewhat accurate, even though not accurately measuring attractiveness. How would models work on rating who would be a good NBA player / runner etc. I wonder if just being white would get me downrated.
  - BoorishBears 4y ago
    Are you missing the part where the model gave two scores for the same picture based on extreme desaturation? Terrible pictures don't make you more attractive on dating sites... It's just a bad model. There's bound to be bias in the model but ML 101 would be randomize saturation and hue on your training set
    - tempnow987 4y ago
      Fair enough. That said, I wouldn't jump to conclusions on how things like saturation or desaturation play into ratings, a lot of instagram filters for example have an a desaturation effect which makes me wonder if folks like that as a look. I don't personally. Very well could be a bad model, but sometimes there are underlying factors that result in these bad models from the training set. And no, it's no ML 101 to randomize elements of your input in the training set, though if you want a broadly applicable model you'd look to have inputs that include a variety of hue and saturation (perhaps that's what you meant - I have seen folks though manually start doing things like randomize hue in the set, where the ratings were on the original image).
projektfu 4y ago
The filter in question, FaceApp "Hollywood" absolutely lightens darker skin tones. It moves everything a little more toward "Warm" colors. It also seems to make noses more slender but leaves lips large or enlarges them. That's my unscientific extrapolation from a few samples I saw.
dzhiurgis 4y ago
Cameras used to be notoriously bad at picking up dark skin colours correctly. Apps might fix it.
- MiddleEndian 4y ago
  >used to be Apparently still an issue. When two friends of mine, a black woman and a white man, got married, they had to find a specific photographer who specialized in simultaneously photographing black and white people.

by mdoms 4y ago

ErikVandeWater 4y ago

I wonder if in predominantly black countries, darkening the skin tones of white applicants would be considered beautifying.

dwater 4y ago
Generally, European colonizers imported their anti-dark skin biases (colourism) to their African colonies and they persist to this day among the black populations. https://www.e-ir.info/2020/04/11/critical-reflections-on-ethnicity-and-colourism-in-africa-and-the-diaspora/ https://www.e-ir.info/2020/04/11/critical-reflections-on-eth...
- thaumasiotes 4y ago
  > and they persist to this day among the black populations. Well, light skin preference for females persists to this day in African populations and every other population. It was also present -- and documented even in Africa -- before any European presence existed, so it's strange to say that Europeans imported it. And darker skin is usually preferred for men.
  - rajin444 4y ago
    I'm not sure how to account for darker skin _may_ be less attractive to humans on a genetic level. It's a question science can't answer, so I don't know how we could control for it. i.e, it could be the truth that the lighter your skin is the more attractive you are. How do we rule that out?
    - thaumasiotes 4y ago
      >> darker skin is usually preferred for men.
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
  - dagaci 4y ago
    Zooming out, you should understand than African's have darker skin generally because they literally selected for that preference and those men had more wives and more descendants for those choices, the reverse is true for Europe. These choices of course being influenced by other factors but the point is an example that it is always important to articulate the forest as well as the trees.
  - autoexec 4y ago
    > It was also present -- and documented even in Africa Do you have a source for that? I'm not disagreeing, only curious.
    - thaumasiotes 4y ago
      Peter Frost writes a lot about this. Here are two (heavily overlapping) articles: https://evoandproud.blogspot.com/2006/12/skin-color-preference-in-sub-saharan.html https://evoandproud.blogspot.com/2006/12/skin-color-preferen... https://evoandproud.blogspot.com/2013/08/perception-of-skin-color-in-sub-saharan.html https://evoandproud.blogspot.com/2013/08/perception-of-skin-... Another observation he's made is that black children are born light and darken, with a noticeable sex difference: - Black males darken until eventually they reach adult darkness. - Black females darken until puberty, at which point they are darker than they will be as adults. One of the changes they experience during puberty is a lightening of their skin.

BoorishBears 4y ago

I remember stumbling across a "beauty rating" site that had an ML model trained to rate photos on beauty. At the risk of sounding conceited, when it gave me (black male) a bad score, I knew something had to be wrong. I went and searched for photos of famous black males generally accepted as attractive and noticed it also gave them poor scores. That gave me a hunch about what was going on, and lo and behold: taking the same exact photos, but processed to black and white and brightened, resulted in extremely high scores. The model was essentially measuring how light your skin is.

HarryHirsch 4y ago
ML models are... very local. They fail at sensemaking. If it's any comfort, the same model would probably identify President Mobutu as a leopard.
tempnow987 4y ago
There are some studies I believe that show even attractive african american women can have trouble with low click through / match / rating on dating sites. So if the model was trained on who folks wanted to date (as a measure of attractiveness) the model could still be somewhat accurate, even though not accurately measuring attractiveness. How would models work on rating who would be a good NBA player / runner etc. I wonder if just being white would get me downrated.
- BoorishBears 4y ago
  Are you missing the part where the model gave two scores for the same picture based on extreme desaturation? Terrible pictures don't make you more attractive on dating sites... It's just a bad model. There's bound to be bias in the model but ML 101 would be randomize saturation and hue on your training set
  - tempnow987 4y ago
    Fair enough. That said, I wouldn't jump to conclusions on how things like saturation or desaturation play into ratings, a lot of instagram filters for example have an a desaturation effect which makes me wonder if folks like that as a look. I don't personally. Very well could be a bad model, but sometimes there are underlying factors that result in these bad models from the training set. And no, it's no ML 101 to randomize elements of your input in the training set, though if you want a broadly applicable model you'd look to have inputs that include a variety of hue and saturation (perhaps that's what you meant - I have seen folks though manually start doing things like randomize hue in the set, where the ratings were on the original image).

projektfu 4y ago

The filter in question, FaceApp "Hollywood" absolutely lightens darker skin tones. It moves everything a little more toward "Warm" colors. It also seems to make noses more slender but leaves lips large or enlarges them. That's my unscientific extrapolation from a few samples I saw.

dzhiurgis 4y ago

Cameras used to be notoriously bad at picking up dark skin colours correctly. Apps might fix it.

MiddleEndian 4y ago
>used to be Apparently still an issue. When two friends of mine, a black woman and a white man, got married, they had to find a specific photographer who specialized in simultaneously photographing black and white people.