Science

It's not only growing up with them. We're just better identifying people/animals/things we're familiar with. Horses all look the same if you're not around them regularly. You can distinguish colours, but that's it.

Not comparing people to horses by the way...

I thought they would have trained it on mugshots. Either way, it should never be used to make direct arrests. I feel like it's best use would be something like an anonymous tip line that leads to investigation.

Also makes me wonder if our defined digital color spaces being bad at representing darker shades contributes as well.

I don't know that facial recognition should be illegal for cops to use (though I don't want them using it, overall), but there should be guardrails in place that prevent them from using it as anything more than "let's look into this person further."

Put differently, a report of a certain model car of a certain color can tip them off to investigate someone driving such a car. It isn't a reason to arrest that person.

Exactly! I don't think any programmer would intentionally go out of their way to make it so that only the people with dark skin tones are matched from the database. It has got something to do with how it is not easy to detect facial features on a darker skin tone. The image vectors will have noisy information per pixel and the pixel intensities will be similar in some patches of the image because of the darker skin tone. But that's just my unbiased programmer's way of thinking. Let's hope the world is still beautiful !We are all humans afterall

Yes, there are technical challenges when implementing an AI solution such as this one. From a leadership perspective; however, arrests cannot be made on AI predictions alone. They would be best used like an anonymous tip line that leads to further investigation, but not ever directly to an arrest.

That's exactly my idea on media sensationalism. It's really not a large sample. Way more people have been arrested and imprisoned by the justice system without any AI involvement.

Then the title would read:

In every reported case where police mistakenly arrested someone, that person has been Black

Yeah, that could be the case

I always wonder if the people that are so hard against systemic/structural racism are really thinking that they are being oppressed if someone tries to address that or if they are fully aware of the advantages they have just because they are born with the "right" skincolor in the right neighbourhoods and are against it for purely egoistic reasons because they don't want to lose that advantage

@nieceandtows @lntl It can be both.

haha this is reminding me of an episode of Better off Ted, where they replaced all sensors with optical based ones that did not recognize black people. Their solution was to hire white guys to follow them around to open doors and turn on lights for them

IMO, the fact that the models aren't accurate with people of color but they're putting the AI to use for them anyway is the systemic racism. If the AI were not good at identifying white people do we really think it would be in active use for arresting people?

It's not the fact that the technology is much much worse at identifying people of color that is the issue, it's the fact that it's being used anyway despite it.

And if you say "oh, they're just being stupid and didn't realize it's doing that " then it's egregious that they didn't even check for that.

it’s the technology itself that’s lacking.

the technology is designed by people, people who didn't consider those with dark skin and so designed a technology that is lacking.
Lets not act as if technology just springs spontaneously in to being.

I recall many stories over the years on this. Eg https://onezero.medium.com/zooms-virtual-background-feature-isn-t-built-for-black-faces-e0a97b591955

I think it is come systematic racism. AI didn't arrest this person, police officers did. They did no further investigation before making the arrest because they didn't have to: the person has black skin. Case closed.

In the documentary Coded Bias, the police in England were utilizing new AI facial recognition technology to find criminals on the streets and yes they were almost all black. The documentary states that it is because the models were trained on mostly white people so it couldn't differentiate black peoples features as well. Or something to that affect.

I imagine that in China the headline would read:

In every reported case where police mistakenly arrested someone using facial recognition, that person has been Chinese

Even worse, Google seems to think they fixed it in 2018. Google ‘fixed’ its racist algorithm by removing gorillas from its image-labeling tech