9 ms·

Multiple mentions of "skin tone" and AI. Did they really mess up skin tone recognition that bad that they needed three different solutions to it? (I feel like

Multiple mentions of "skin tone" and AI. Did they really mess up skin tone recognition that bad that they needed three different solutions to it? (I feel like I missed some major fuckup on their end) https://blog.google/products/assistant/assistant-io-2022/ https://blog.google/products/assistant/assistant-io-2022/ https://blog.google/products/search/monk-skin-tone-scale/ https://blog.google/products/search/monk-skin-tone-scale/ https://blog.google/technology/research/ai-monk-scale-skin-tone-story/ https://blog.google/technology/research/ai-monk-scale-skin-t...

babyshake 4y ago
Their super bowl ad was also focused on fixing AI racism. There is surely a political and marketing aspect to this focus.
- faitswulff 4y ago
  Their emerging markets are all non-white.
- Daishiman 4y ago
  There is the objective fact that darker skin tones are harder for some AI algos to process due to lower contrast. There's also the fact that a lot of training data just didn't have people of darker skin, and that a couple of news article pointed out that some people were classified in object detection systems in a rather... racist way.
samhw 4y ago
> “In our research, we found that a lot of the time people feel they’re lumped into racial categories, but there’s all this heterogeneity with ethnic and racial categories,” Dr. Monk says. "People think we're lumping them into racial categories. But we're actually lumping them into slightly narrower racial categories!"
jjcm 4y ago
Random side note - I'm amazed they're using gifs here to show off their subtle color updates to skin tone.
Workaccount2 4y ago
- nostrademons 4y ago
  https://careers.google.com/ https://careers.google.com/, scroll down to "Spotlight", scroll over to "Data center roles" or "Staff Software Engineer", both pictures of white male talking to white female. Globally white people are about 10% of the population, so I'd expect 1 in 10 people in a representative sample to be white, which feels about right for much of Google's marketing material.
  - fizwhiz 4y ago
    > both pictures of white male talking to white female. white passing *
  - usrn 4y ago
    Google is a US company though.
    - deadmutex 4y ago
      Google has a huge employee and user base across multiple continents.
  - Workaccount2 4y ago
    A lone white male. Sorry it wasn't totally clear. For all intents and purposes, women count as minorities. Google has plenty of pictures with white women, and white men and women. But so far I have only found one picture with a lone white male (on one of the chromecast pages, on the TV was a show page, and the show page had a lone white male). I guess they can get 1/2 credit for that. Oh and I found a picture of a lone white guy, but he was disabled. So I guess that technically counts, although he would still fall into the "minority/disadvantaged" camp.
    - nostrademons 4y ago
SemanticStrengh 4y ago
So much hypocrisy going on. If fighting racism was the goal Unicode should not have added skin colored emojis. This is the dumbest move ever.
- adamrezich 4y ago
  I will never understand why emoji, the whole point of which is to convey universal emotions (and other icons), ever needed skin tone modifiers at all. why do "thumbs up" and "thumbs up, but i'm white btw" need to be encoded differently? why is everyone OK with Native Americans and other ethnicities with reddish skin tones being excluded? just a complete mess top-to-bottom, and now we can basically never undo it. imagine trying to explain to aliens from another planet 500 years from now why 500 years ago we decided to a.) include skin tone modifiers to begin with and b.) only allow for the gradation of skin colors that we do. beyond ridiculous. EDIT: I forgot to mention how insanely ridiculous it is that we have these skin tone modifiers, but they don't even work for all "people" emoji, because of the obvious issue of rendering cartoon human faces in a way that isn't considered a racist caricature for many races. this makes sense of course, but I can't understand why, when this argument came up, they didn't just choose to scrap the whole idea instead of implementing it and restricting it to a subset of "people" emoji.
  - ben_w 4y ago
    People like customising these things to be mini-avatars as a form of self expression. I don’t see a reason to get upset about this option existing — not even from the perspective of “oh no strings are even weirder, I can’t safely treat them as a stream of bytes all the time”, given that combining characters are needed for other stuff anyway. (No idea why you think other skin tones can’t be added later).
    - adamrezich 4y ago
      >(No idea why you think other skin tones can’t be added later). because why would we add further bloat and implementation complexity to something that is already bloated and complex to implement?
joshuamorton 4y ago
If by "they" you mean "the entire industry" then yes. Basically all vision products are notoriously bad at dealing with darker skin tones.
scardycat 4y ago
The Pixel 6 Pro camera, which they showcase and market as capable of representing true skin tone [1], has been a pain in the neck for me. I am a brown skinned person with a balding head and the camera preview and final product are completely different. The final product adds random blotches of dark tones on my face and head. None of the photos are usable. This is 100% reproducible especially in bright day light. I filed a bug report with offer to send in my pictures as samples, not a single response, its been 4+ months. 1. https://store.google.com/intl/en/discover/realtone/ https://store.google.com/intl/en/discover/realtone/
- The_Colonel 4y ago
  It's a catastrophe for white people as well. My wife has blue eyes, and the camera pretty consistently makes them black. Skin usually turns gray. The portrait looks fine in the preview, but the algorithm messes it up.
- uuyi 4y ago
  Similar weird problems in portrait mode on my iPhone 13 Pro. My youngest daughter comes out looking like an unholy tellytubby on crack for some reason. Got fed up of trying to negotiate with the bastard thing and bought a Nikon mirrorless instead. Absolutely no regrets.
2OEH8eoCRo0 4y ago
Funny. I interviewed with them recently and was asked about how to better represent minorities in photographs. I'm a white male, interviewer was not.

babyshake 4y ago

Their super bowl ad was also focused on fixing AI racism. There is surely a political and marketing aspect to this focus.

faitswulff 4y ago
Their emerging markets are all non-white.
Daishiman 4y ago
There is the objective fact that darker skin tones are harder for some AI algos to process due to lower contrast. There's also the fact that a lot of training data just didn't have people of darker skin, and that a couple of news article pointed out that some people were classified in object detection systems in a rather... racist way.

samhw 4y ago

> “In our research, we found that a lot of the time people feel they’re lumped into racial categories, but there’s all this heterogeneity with ethnic and racial categories,” Dr. Monk says. "People think we're lumping them into racial categories. But we're actually lumping them into slightly narrower racial categories!"

jjcm 4y ago

Random side note - I'm amazed they're using gifs here to show off their subtle color updates to skin tone.

Workaccount2 4y ago

nostrademons 4y ago
https://careers.google.com/ https://careers.google.com/, scroll down to "Spotlight", scroll over to "Data center roles" or "Staff Software Engineer", both pictures of white male talking to white female. Globally white people are about 10% of the population, so I'd expect 1 in 10 people in a representative sample to be white, which feels about right for much of Google's marketing material.
- fizwhiz 4y ago
  > both pictures of white male talking to white female. white passing *
- usrn 4y ago
  Google is a US company though.
  - deadmutex 4y ago
    Google has a huge employee and user base across multiple continents.
- Workaccount2 4y ago
  A lone white male. Sorry it wasn't totally clear. For all intents and purposes, women count as minorities. Google has plenty of pictures with white women, and white men and women. But so far I have only found one picture with a lone white male (on one of the chromecast pages, on the TV was a show page, and the show page had a lone white male). I guess they can get 1/2 credit for that. Oh and I found a picture of a lone white guy, but he was disabled. So I guess that technically counts, although he would still fall into the "minority/disadvantaged" camp.
  - nostrademons 4y ago

SemanticStrengh 4y ago

So much hypocrisy going on. If fighting racism was the goal Unicode should not have added skin colored emojis. This is the dumbest move ever.

adamrezich 4y ago
I will never understand why emoji, the whole point of which is to convey universal emotions (and other icons), ever needed skin tone modifiers at all. why do "thumbs up" and "thumbs up, but i'm white btw" need to be encoded differently? why is everyone OK with Native Americans and other ethnicities with reddish skin tones being excluded? just a complete mess top-to-bottom, and now we can basically never undo it. imagine trying to explain to aliens from another planet 500 years from now why 500 years ago we decided to a.) include skin tone modifiers to begin with and b.) only allow for the gradation of skin colors that we do. beyond ridiculous. EDIT: I forgot to mention how insanely ridiculous it is that we have these skin tone modifiers, but they don't even work for all "people" emoji, because of the obvious issue of rendering cartoon human faces in a way that isn't considered a racist caricature for many races. this makes sense of course, but I can't understand why, when this argument came up, they didn't just choose to scrap the whole idea instead of implementing it and restricting it to a subset of "people" emoji.
- ben_w 4y ago
  People like customising these things to be mini-avatars as a form of self expression. I don’t see a reason to get upset about this option existing — not even from the perspective of “oh no strings are even weirder, I can’t safely treat them as a stream of bytes all the time”, given that combining characters are needed for other stuff anyway. (No idea why you think other skin tones can’t be added later).
  - adamrezich 4y ago
    >(No idea why you think other skin tones can’t be added later). because why would we add further bloat and implementation complexity to something that is already bloated and complex to implement?

joshuamorton 4y ago

If by "they" you mean "the entire industry" then yes. Basically all vision products are notoriously bad at dealing with darker skin tones.

scardycat 4y ago

The Pixel 6 Pro camera, which they showcase and market as capable of representing true skin tone [1], has been a pain in the neck for me. I am a brown skinned person with a balding head and the camera preview and final product are completely different. The final product adds random blotches of dark tones on my face and head. None of the photos are usable. This is 100% reproducible especially in bright day light. I filed a bug report with offer to send in my pictures as samples, not a single response, its been 4+ months. 1. https://store.google.com/intl/en/discover/realtone/ https://store.google.com/intl/en/discover/realtone/

The_Colonel 4y ago
It's a catastrophe for white people as well. My wife has blue eyes, and the camera pretty consistently makes them black. Skin usually turns gray. The portrait looks fine in the preview, but the algorithm messes it up.
uuyi 4y ago
Similar weird problems in portrait mode on my iPhone 13 Pro. My youngest daughter comes out looking like an unholy tellytubby on crack for some reason. Got fed up of trying to negotiate with the bastard thing and bought a Nikon mirrorless instead. Absolutely no regrets.

2OEH8eoCRo0 4y ago

Funny. I interviewed with them recently and was asked about how to better represent minorities in photographs. I'm a white male, interviewer was not.