> it's incredibly irresponsible (and probably racist) as well as dismissive of actual racism to pretend that's racist. Because of the entanglement of people wh

> it's incredibly irresponsible (and probably racist) as well as dismissive of actual racism to pretend that's racist. Because of the entanglement of people who harbor individual racial animus and the systemic factors that lead to disparate outcomes for people of different races we are in a bad situation vis-a-vie language, but I think this isn't quite right. I agree there's no reason to believe the engineers involved had any prejudice (i.e. individualized animus against non-white people). It's the result of under-testing or corner cases or whatever. However, the system is definitely racist. It's racist in the sense that it has an adverse impact on people of different races (white people will not be mis-detected as gorillas) and its racist in the sense that there must have been racial imbalances in development (one struggles to imagine this being launched if all humans were being detected as gorillas for instance). This doesn't require any prejudice on the part of the people making it - it's just a fact that we can observe that it has disparate racial impacts and that choices in its development have led to a product that is unevenly useful to people of different races. It's also clear because facial recognition systems perform worse across all measures on people with darker skin (not just on this metric) - it's not like the accuracy rate is the same but the mistakes are different. Also, of course, yes - people will point out that different skin tones interact differently with photographic technology and algorithm designers are fighting an up hill battle. It's true! We have historically been good at solving the challenges of capturing images of light skinned people better than dark skinned ones. That's racist too! It's hard to not build a racist system when your tools already have racial bias. Again - pointing out the racial bias in this system is not an indictment of the people who built it. It's an indictment of the world it emerged out of and a bookmark to come back to when you see people using the outputs of the system.