3 ms·

If bias can only be seen by a minority of people ... is it really 'AI bias', or just societal bias? > “In one of the experiment scenarios — which featured rac

If bias can only be seen by a minority of people ... is it really 'AI bias', or just societal bias? > “In one of the experiment scenarios — which featured racially biased AI performance — the system failed to accurately classify the facial expression of the images from minority groups,” Could it be that real people have trouble reading the facial expression of the image of minority groups?

ecocentrik 1y ago
By "real people" do you mean people who are not members of those minority groups? Or are people who can "accurately classify the facial expression of images from minority groups" not "real people"? I hope you can see the problem with your very lazy argument.
- lovemenot 1y ago
  AI are not real people. Obviously. Just look at the first line to see the intended line of argument. It's not about which people per se, but how many, in aggregate.
SpicyLemonZest 1y ago
I guess I'm not sure what the point of the dichotomy is. Suppose you're developing a system to identify how fast a vehicle is moving, and you discover that it systematically overestimates the velocity of anything painted red. Regardless of whether you call that problem "AI bias" or "societal bias" or some other phrase that doesn't include the word "bias", isn't it something you want to fix?
Bnjoroge 1y ago
what? do you think the facial expression of a person of color is significantly different from that of a white person?
- theturtlemoves 1y ago
  Not the op but to me personally: yes. Facial structure, lips, eyes.. The configuration tilts towards an expression that I interpret differently. A friend of mine is Asian, I've learned to be better at it, but to me he at first looked like having flatter affect than average.. People of color look more naive than average to me, across the board, probably due to their facial features. I perceive them as having less tension in the face I think (which is interesting now that I think about it)
- DocTomoe 1y ago
  Yes. I have a background in East Asian cultural studies. A lot more expressions are done via the eyes there rather than the mouth. For the uninitiated, it's subtle, but once you get used to it, it becomes more obvious. Anthropologists call that display rules and encoding differences. Cultures don’t just express emotion differently, but they also read it differently. A Japanese smile can be social camouflage, while an American smile signals approachability. I guess that's why western animation over-emphasizes the mouth, while eastern animation tend to over-emphasize the eyes. Why would Yakutian, Indio or Namib populations not have similar phenomeon an AI (or a stereotypical white westerner who does not excessively study those societies/cultures) would not immediately recognise? AI trained on Western facial databases inherits those perceptual shortcuts. It "learns" to detect happiness by wide mouths and visible teeth, sadness by drooping lips - so anything outside that grammar registers as neutral or misclassified. And it gets reinforced by (western) users: a hypothetical 'perfect' face-emotion-identification AI would probably be percieved a less reliable to the white western user than the one that mirrors the biasses.

ecocentrik 1y ago

By "real people" do you mean people who are not members of those minority groups? Or are people who can "accurately classify the facial expression of images from minority groups" not "real people"? I hope you can see the problem with your very lazy argument.

lovemenot 1y ago
AI are not real people. Obviously. Just look at the first line to see the intended line of argument. It's not about which people per se, but how many, in aggregate.

SpicyLemonZest 1y ago

I guess I'm not sure what the point of the dichotomy is. Suppose you're developing a system to identify how fast a vehicle is moving, and you discover that it systematically overestimates the velocity of anything painted red. Regardless of whether you call that problem "AI bias" or "societal bias" or some other phrase that doesn't include the word "bias", isn't it something you want to fix?

Bnjoroge 1y ago

what? do you think the facial expression of a person of color is significantly different from that of a white person?

theturtlemoves 1y ago
Not the op but to me personally: yes. Facial structure, lips, eyes.. The configuration tilts towards an expression that I interpret differently. A friend of mine is Asian, I've learned to be better at it, but to me he at first looked like having flatter affect than average.. People of color look more naive than average to me, across the board, probably due to their facial features. I perceive them as having less tension in the face I think (which is interesting now that I think about it)
DocTomoe 1y ago
Yes. I have a background in East Asian cultural studies. A lot more expressions are done via the eyes there rather than the mouth. For the uninitiated, it's subtle, but once you get used to it, it becomes more obvious. Anthropologists call that display rules and encoding differences. Cultures don’t just express emotion differently, but they also read it differently. A Japanese smile can be social camouflage, while an American smile signals approachability. I guess that's why western animation over-emphasizes the mouth, while eastern animation tend to over-emphasize the eyes. Why would Yakutian, Indio or Namib populations not have similar phenomeon an AI (or a stereotypical white westerner who does not excessively study those societies/cultures) would not immediately recognise? AI trained on Western facial databases inherits those perceptual shortcuts. It "learns" to detect happiness by wide mouths and visible teeth, sadness by drooping lips - so anything outside that grammar registers as neutral or misclassified. And it gets reinforced by (western) users: a hypothetical 'perfect' face-emotion-identification AI would probably be percieved a less reliable to the white western user than the one that mirrors the biasses.