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.

Comments

Re:So it will be no good

[serviscope_minor]

For catching criminals then?

Trump's a white guy isn't he?

Re: Racist, or accurate?

[Zero__Kelvin]

Actually that is literally the definition of racism.

Re: So it will be no good

[Anonymous Coward]

You sound like a colored. Maybe you have a crime to confess?

Re:So it will be no good

[swillden]

For catching criminals then?

Probably not much good in societies where all the white men are wealthy and privileged, and all the minorities and women are poor and disenfranchised. Not that the wealthy and privileged don't commit crimes, but they don't commit the sort where face recognition is likely to be helpful.