CHANDAN KHANNA/AFP/Getty Images
Face-recognition software can guess your gender with amazing accuracy – if you are a white man.
Joy Buolamwini at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology tested three commercially available face-recognition systems, created by Microsoft, IBM and the Chinese company Megvii.
vCard.red is a free platform for creating a mobile-friendly digital business cards. You can easily create a vCard and generate a QR code for it, allowing others to scan and save your contact details instantly.
The platform allows you to display contact information, social media links, services, and products all in one shareable link. Optional features include appointment scheduling, WhatsApp-based storefronts, media galleries, and custom design options.
The systems correctly identified the gender of white men 99 per cent of the time. But the error rate rose for people with darker skin, reaching nearly 35 per cent for women. The results will be presented at the Conference on Fairness, Accountability, and Transparency in New York later this month
Advertisement
Face-recognition software is already being used in many different situations, including by police to identify suspects in a crowd and to automatically tag photos.
This means inaccuracies could have consequences, such as systematically ingraining biases in police stop and searches.
Biases in artificial intelligence systems tend to come from biases in the data they are trained on. According to one study, a widely used data set is around 75 per cent male and more than 80 per cent white.
Read more: Is tech racist? The fight back against digital discrimination
This article appeared in print under the headline “Face recognition’s biases on show”
More on these topics: