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Amazon Is Pushing Facial Recognition Tech That a Study Says Could Be Biased (nytimes.com)
An anonymous reader quotes a report from The New York Times: Over the last two years, Amazon has aggressively marketed its facial recognition technology to police departments and federal agencies as a service to help law enforcement identify suspects more quickly. Now a new study from researchers at the M.I.T. Media Lab has found that Amazon's system, Rekognition, had much more difficulty in telling the gender of female faces and of darker-skinned faces in photos than similar services from IBM and Microsoft. The results raise questions about potential bias that could hamper Amazon's drive to popularize the technology.
In the study, published Thursday, Rekognition made no errors in recognizing the gender of lighter-skinned men. But it misclassified women as men 19 percent of the time, the researchers said, and mistook darker-skinned women for men 31 percent of the time. Microsoft's technology mistook darker-skinned women for men just 1.5 percent of the time. For the latest study, [co-author of the study, Ms. Buolamwini, said] she sent a letter with some preliminary results to Amazon seven months ago. But she said that she hadn't heard back from Amazon, and that when she and a co-author retested the company's product a couple of months later, it had not improved. "It's not possible to draw a conclusion on the accuracy of facial recognition for any use case -- including law enforcement -- based on results obtained using facial analysis," Matt Wood, general manager of AI at Amazon Web Services, said. He added that the researchers had not tested the latest version of Rekognition, which was updated in November.
"Amazon said that in recent internal tests using an updated version of its service, the company found no difference in accuracy in classifying gender across all ethnicities," the NYT reports. The new study is scheduled to be presented Monday at an artificial intelligence and ethics conference in Honolulu.
In the study, published Thursday, Rekognition made no errors in recognizing the gender of lighter-skinned men. But it misclassified women as men 19 percent of the time, the researchers said, and mistook darker-skinned women for men 31 percent of the time. Microsoft's technology mistook darker-skinned women for men just 1.5 percent of the time. For the latest study, [co-author of the study, Ms. Buolamwini, said] she sent a letter with some preliminary results to Amazon seven months ago. But she said that she hadn't heard back from Amazon, and that when she and a co-author retested the company's product a couple of months later, it had not improved. "It's not possible to draw a conclusion on the accuracy of facial recognition for any use case -- including law enforcement -- based on results obtained using facial analysis," Matt Wood, general manager of AI at Amazon Web Services, said. He added that the researchers had not tested the latest version of Rekognition, which was updated in November.
"Amazon said that in recent internal tests using an updated version of its service, the company found no difference in accuracy in classifying gender across all ethnicities," the NYT reports. The new study is scheduled to be presented Monday at an artificial intelligence and ethics conference in Honolulu.
fucking below zero this morning. This is bullshit. Anyone that thinks the climate is warming is not paying attention to the evidence right outside their window. If you can see out it, through the ice.
Software can be inaccurate. It can't be biased.
Doh!
>to be presented Monday at an artificial intelligence and ethics conference in Honolulu.
When you really want in depth information on AI and ethics, you HAVE to go spend a week in beautiful Hawaii. That's where all the.... uh.... stuff is.
that all black people look the same?
So the message is that the software is much more likely to be successful at apprehending guilty white people? Sorry for using a racist tag ("white") in my comment.
It does sound like it's strongly biased against white people and should be scrutinized carefully.
...when the concern about this tech is not that it exists but that it might be "unfair" to some artificial identity politics minority.
Lol idiots (journalists)
How well does it discriminate between the individuals? Law enforcement should focus on known criminals and the behaviour of the individuals rather than their gender, which should be more important for researchers and marketers.
Along with all the other morons who believe that local weather = global climate.
Where are we going and why are we in a handbasket?
the company found no difference in accuracy in classifying gender across all ethnicities
Maybe the spokesperson is clueless, but ethnicity is not race. Look at people in Cuba: some appear Black, some European, some Native American, many are mixed. But all are Hispanic ethnicity.
work by recording the light reflected from objects.
Darker-toned faces reflect less visible-wavelength light.
That's just physics, not racism.
So the amount of light, and ability to resolve contrasts, edges etc, would be less.
So the image classification task might be subject to more error.
Perhaps a different spectral range would work better?
Where are we going and why are we in a handbasket?
The vindication of the Covington students is the 10,000th tar-and-feathering of The Enemy of the People. This time around, the sadists and psychopaths who think it’s normal to entertain fantasies about murdering an infant (“baby Hitler”) have hit a limit in the public's moral turpitude with their war against some Catholic school kids. Like Yechiel of Paris, they’re quickly hiding their Talmuds and chalking up the weekend’s display of anti-white brutality to an innocent misunderstanding.
You see, the calls to political violence, murder and harassment put out by verified card-carrying Antifa journos hired in our media to instigate political violence, murder and harassment are really the product of Russian interference!
*insert laugh track*
But Kremlin conspiracy theories don’t explain what happened a couple of weeks ago when Shaun King brazenly tried to frame Robert Cantrell for the cold-blooded murder of black 7-year-old Jazmine Barnes. As usual, the real culprits were reckless black criminals, but that didn’t stop King from pulling a story about racism and hate crimes out of his lily white ass.
Somebody, King said, told him Cantrell was “racist,” so he should go to jail anyway!
King deleted the tweets, but Cantrell and his family will never recover. The Floyd Corkins type moron who would try and kill them or continue to send them death threats aren’t the types who will see the exonerating confessions limited largely to local news.
Thank Panther God. Ordinary whites don’t have any advocates or lawyers!
King is a serial slanderer. In the fall of 2015, King accused a University of Delaware student of hanging nooses on her campus to try and intimidate local blacks. It turns out she was hanging paper lanterns. King deleted his accusation after the damage was done. He’s not sorry.
Later, King and his lawyer buddy Lee Merritt accused a cop of raping a black woman. When the video of the arrest came out and it turned out to be a big lie , he deleted and kept going like nothing happened.
In the same year, King joined forces with the NAACP to accuse a 60-year-old white day laborer in Grand Rapids of calling a group of black children the “n-word” and urinating on them. This too turned out to be a hoax worthy of a “-gate”. Once more, mostly just the local media seemed interested in clearing this innocent man’s name after the salacious smear was broadcast worldwide.
Delete and repeat.
What about the DeAndre Harris incident? King was the central figure in poisoning the case before it even started. Using the tactic of video edited out of context to incite the mob on the twitter echo chamber, he was one of multiple catalysts for the subsequent political pressure to put on a Soviet show trial.
All the conservatives (with the exception of Ann Coulter, briefly Trump and maybe Tucker), including numerous alt-light opportunists, tried to placate the Antifa and oligarch propagandists (who later used precedents created here to purge the alt-lights anyway) by supporting their claim that there’s two sides to every story except Charlottesville. You see, in Cville, the Revolutionary Communist Party, DSA and black bloc anarchists magically diverged from their well-worn pattern of initiating violence, vocally reveling in it, and then lying about it to sic the politicians, police and litigators on their victims.
The damage was great. Like all trials related to nationalists in Charlottesville, a number of patriots are now doing 6-10 years in a Virginia solitary confinement dungeon for what was a clear case of non-newsworthy self-defense obfuscated by agenda-soaked fake news. The American criminal justice system was discredited in front of the eyes of millions and they don’t care.
The same trick didn’t work against the MAGA kids, but the people now apologizing and deleting their instructions to violence against the teens (not protected by Brandenburg
Why the hell would you WANT some fucked up bezos computer to identify you as you walk down the street?
I would say it is biased against bald beardless white men. Black women get misidentified at such a high rate the tech is worthless to identify them. That is a GOOD THING FOR BLACK WOMEN!!!
Iâ(TM)m not bald and now I am definitely keeping my beard. For once, a benefit to being a black woman: you dont get tracked and stored by bezos and his evil minions.
And any amazon engineers reading this who worked on the tech, SHAME ON YOU! You could have earned just as much working on tech that is not evil and not putting it straight into the hands of evil people and everyone with a dollar.
When a person recognises another person's face we usually mean to say that they've seen the person before and/or can possibly identify the person.
This slashdot article suggests that something else is meant here: gender and race recognition. Is that indeed the case? Are we asking law-enforcement systems to identify gender and race?
If so, to what end? To find people based that match often vague descriptions?
I'm probably being a moron for not realising this until now. All this time I thought they were just looking to match people on the street with photos of people that are "wanted".
It does not matter what color, gender or religion you are. We can All be Bros. The important thing to do is divide the world up along the lines of thin crust pizza or thick crust pizza. All people who eat thick crust are destroying the planet and raping babies. They need to die.
Go thin crusy
Why is this a good think for Black women? It seems like they'd be falsely arrested at a higher rate than other people, assuming the tech is seeking matches for wanted criminals or terrorists.
Facebook would *never* promote a technology without thoroughly thinking through the implications. They are the pinnacle of corporate social responsibilty...
Come to think of it, that last part may actually be true.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
Obviously this technology needs to be banned from use until it misidentifies men as women as often as it misidentifies women as men. We can't allow anything that yields unequal results from ever being used.
I'm human and in 2019 I'm not always sure - is the AI being trained to recognize chromosomes or affect? This is not a troll, I am serious.
therefore this is a non-story.
Y'all look alike to the rest of us.
"Facial Recognition Tech That a Study Says Could Be Biased"
Is Facial Recognition Tech, supposed to be absolutely error free, or, how much error it is allowed to have exactly?
Is Facial Recognition Tech, always do less errors than any human doing the same job, or more?
If Facial Recognition Tech does errors, what is the harm of those errors exactly?
If a facial recognition tech identifies somebody as a criminal, are the police just go & arrest that person & put him/her to jail?
Nobody ever checks/verifies (first) whatever Facial Recognition Tech says?
They probably trained this on their full-time development staff.
They should have included warehouse staff, and then a double measure of cleaning/maintenance staff.
There. Fixed that.
Some people are under the mistaken impression that something wildly inaccurate and highly biased towards false positives wouldn't be sufficient to void Constitutional rights. The Supreme Court put that notion to rest when they ruled a cop merely needs to claim a dog trained to please him gave permission, and the 4th Amendment is gone. People who think inaccuracy is a good thing will be sorely disappointed. Well, they won't until the day comes when they're on the receiving end of police bullshit, but then they will.
Remember when Google's image algorithm classified multiple black people like gorillas and monkeys? YouTube's video suggestion algorithm did the same thing: After a report on a crime committed by black people, viewers were recommended a video of a baby gorilla born at a zoo.
This pattern recognition was completely unbiased. Without human political correctness, computers do think black people look like gorillas, and that's a harsh pill for many to swallow.
Am I surprised that black people are again on the raw end of computer logic? No. Computers think that black women look like black men a significant percentage of the time. Programmers now need to try and figure out how not to misgender black women (a really hard problem to solve in technology). I suggest that young non-black children might even have a similar struggle and error rate in black gender identification by facial photo.