AI beauty contest accused of racial bias
The winners of an AI-judged beauty contest were mostly white, prompting heated criticism that the results were racially biased. Beauty.AI 2.0 was an AI-judged beauty contest o rganised by Hong Kong-based c ompany Youth Laboratories in which five neural network-based algorithms assessed the beauty of 60,000 public entries. Of the 44 'winners', nearly all the winners were white, with a few Asian and one dark skinned. Youth Laboratories defended the results by arguing that inadequate data may have skewed the results and that roughly 75 percent of entrants were white Europeans, whereas only 7 percent and 1 percent were from India and Africa. The five model 'robot' jury selected to judge the contest were told they would 'go down in history as one of the first data scientists who taught a machine to estimate human attractiveness'. The following year's contest was cancelled. System 🤖 Beauty AI 🔗 Operator: Youth Laboratories Developer: Youth Laboratories Country: Russia; Hong Kong Sector: Beauty/cosmetics Purpose: Assess facial beauty Technology: Deep learning; Neural network; Machine learning Issue: Accuracy/reliability; Bias/discrimination
- Date it happened
- 2016-09-01
- Organisation involved
- Youth Laboratories
- Product, system or model
- Beauty AI 2.0
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