Hacker News Reader

Comment by apta | Hacker News Reader

> Her tests on software created by brand-name tech firms such as Amazon uncovered much higher error rates in classifying the gender of darker-skinned women than for lighter-skinned men.

What about lighter-skinned women? This seems to be phrased on purpose to incite bias against white men.

View on HN

Here's the paper [0]. The answer to your question is in Tables 4 and 5 (page 9). To summarize, darker skinned women are misclassified far more often than any other group, in all three of the tested facial recognition systems. Error rates for lighter skinned women are between 5x and 10x lower, depending on the system. Lighter skinned men have the lowest classification error rates by a wide margin in the IBM and Microsoft systems, and are tied with darker skinned men for lowest error rate in the Face++ system.

[0]: http://proceedings.mlr.press/v81/buolamwini18a/buolamwini18a...

Going by the article, it just seems to be because the researcher is a darker-skinned woman and the software is mainly trained on lighter-skinned men.

"Darker-skinned women were the most misclassified group, with error rates of up to 34.7%. By contrast, the maximum error rate for lighter-skinned males was less than 1%."

sure, but I don't think that's her intention. she's just refitting an old already polarizing topic as a vehicle to troll big tech. polarizing topics like these are like performance-enhancers for messaging if you can weave them into your narrative.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com