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Facial Recognition Is Accurate, if You're a White Guy (nytimes.com)
Facial recognition technology is improving by leaps and bounds. Some commercial software can now tell the gender of a person in a photograph. When the person in the photo is a white man, the software is right 99 percent of the time. But the darker the skin, the more errors arise -- up to nearly 35 percent for images of darker skinned women, the New York Times reported, citing a new study. From the report: These disparate results, calculated by Joy Buolamwini, a researcher at the M.I.T. Media Lab, show how some of the biases in the real world can seep into artificial intelligence, the computer systems that inform facial recognition. In modern artificial intelligence, data rules. A.I. software is only as smart as the data used to train it. If there are many more white men than black women in the system, it will be worse at identifying the black women. One widely used facial-recognition data set was estimated to be more than 75 percent male and more than 80 percent white, according to another research study.
Darker colors provide less contrast. Less contrast means features are more difficult to make out.
Combine that with the typically horrendous lighting video cams face and you have a situation where recognition fails.
When Fascism comes to America, it will call itself Anti-Fascism, and tell you to give up your guns.
The point you missed is that set lighting for white people has to be carefully designed and set up. One of the reasons colour film took so long to become practical was the difficulty of getting skin tones right.
If you look at early colour film the skin tones of white people are pretty good, but other colours are way off. Over saturated in places, washed out in others. It was a design decision.
Vox is correctly pointing out that film from the era was not designed for dark skin, and that made it hard for non-white actors. Similar to how when sound came in a lot of actors lost work because they had thick accents.
Note that the Vox article does not contain the word "racist" or even "race". It's pertinent because we are now seeing more black actors on screen and Hollywood finally figured out how to light them properly.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
Also known as the base rate fallacy. If you're looking for a needle in a haystack, an algorithm which correctly distinguishes them 99% of the time is useless.
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Racist? Not really - just that one learns to identify people by looking at people. So Africans generally think Asians and "whites"* look all the same, Asians generally think "whites" and Africans look the same etc.
Nothing strange or racist about that.
Then add the fact that many people have problem identifying others from facial features alone we get a cultural aspect of this "look alike" thing.
There's more than enough contrast for a convolutional neural net to work with. You could probably turn it all into 4 bit grayscale before training and still get excellent results.
The explanation isn't what you propose, but unbalanced training sets. Failing any face is equally bad for the training algorithm. Whether its errors are equally divided among all subgroups, or concentrated in one of them, is equally good for the algorithm. Since it has more data on whites, it can profit more from focusing on features characteristic of them.
You can change the training to penalize having a high error rate for subgroups. But this comes with tradeoffs. Better is to get more training data from the difficult subgroups, and train a better algorithm overall. The best way to get an algorithm that makes few errors on blacks (or any other subgroup) may just be to get an algorithm that makes few errors, period.
The Summary said it was because they were underrepresented in the training data set.
That's what you should first assume when an AI system fails at some particular kind of categorization, so it should hardly be surprising.
I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.
Andrew Finch, the white man recently shot dead by a SWAT team - was not even holding a gun.
If you think prejudice and bigotry lurks behind every action you are either genuinely stupid, or willfully ignorant. Take your pick. Either way, that's how intelligent people see you.