Yeah. It kind of is. If we trained as much for black faces as white faces, the algorithms would be better. Moreover, the background contrast for white faces is frequently worse (against backgrounds of white walls).
> If we trained as much for black faces as white faces
Doesn't Zoom have a large part of their employee base in China, and their US CEO is a Chinese immigrant? So perhaps you should replace "white" with "Asian"?
There is also the question of what constitutes 'racist'. In earlier times the threshold/definition included malicious intent. In 2020 more people, myself included, are prone to include cases of benign neglect/inattention.
While I doubt that this was the intent of the programmers responsible, it doesn't change the fact that people are being discriminated against because of their skin color.
This is not racial discrimination, it's a bug with a piece of software. There are many bugs with software, because behind it are human beings that are being pressured in many ways to ship said software.
Behind all of this is a pretty badly tested library that someone took off GitHub and dumped into Zoom. There is no ill-intent.
If we consider every little thing as racism, we remove the weight of the word and what it actually should be used for. The end of that road being that everyone cries racism for everything and we all become indifferent to hearing the term.
It’s more than a simple bug. It’s a design flaw that results in mistreatment for people of certain skin colors.
You are likely correct that the intent was not malicious. This is no excuse. Throughout history, everyone believes they are doing the right thing or are properly justified, even when heinous acts are being committed. We are master story tellers, and we tell the most twisted stories to ourselves.
At the end of the day, the impact that our actions have matters a lot more than our best intentions.
The cackling villain style of racism is mostly dying with Lee Atwater's generation. The human systems they installed perpetuate it with such subtlety that people can train an algorithm nearly 100% on white faces and not even realize it or think about why those are the most available faces to them. And when they realize it, it's so hard to fix.
This is why the academic definition of racism focuses on systems and the ways people unwittingly perpetuate it rather than trying to assign individual blame. That definition clashes with the definition most people think of where there's someone doing it on purpose.
So in your opinion nobody is racist here? This case does not demonstrate racial bias?
Assuming this is not a once off, the situation certainly implies that either the people who developed the algorithm or the people who made the decision to use it in their product either didn't test that it worked for darker skin colours or worse, they knew the faults but didn't care enough not to use it. That's racism to me.
You've not included any content in your argument, while the people you're calling stupid have. It's possible to argue about racism or lack thereof in a rational way, just like any other topic. It doesn't have to be hostile right off the bat every single time.
Your algorithm is trained on your racially disparate status quo and outputs racially disparate results. If your intent was race-neutral outputs, then you screwed up and the algorithm is implicitly racist. If your intent was outputs racially-biased towards fair-skinned people, then you're explicitly racist and your algorithm is still implicitly racist. Take your pick.
The alternative is not to do it. Companies that produce these algorithms have said not to deploy them against people.
You don't need to have something better in mind to criticize something. Criticism alone can be useful if the endeavor didn't need to be attempted at all.
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[ 2.8 ms ] story [ 59.1 ms ] threadDoesn't Zoom have a large part of their employee base in China, and their US CEO is a Chinese immigrant? So perhaps you should replace "white" with "Asian"?
And actually think implying that the authors of the algo and model are racist equally stupid.
Behind all of this is a pretty badly tested library that someone took off GitHub and dumped into Zoom. There is no ill-intent.
If we consider every little thing as racism, we remove the weight of the word and what it actually should be used for. The end of that road being that everyone cries racism for everything and we all become indifferent to hearing the term.
You are likely correct that the intent was not malicious. This is no excuse. Throughout history, everyone believes they are doing the right thing or are properly justified, even when heinous acts are being committed. We are master story tellers, and we tell the most twisted stories to ourselves.
At the end of the day, the impact that our actions have matters a lot more than our best intentions.
This is why the academic definition of racism focuses on systems and the ways people unwittingly perpetuate it rather than trying to assign individual blame. That definition clashes with the definition most people think of where there's someone doing it on purpose.
If the algorithm was modeled to include many different races I doubt this would be a problem.
Assuming this is not a once off, the situation certainly implies that either the people who developed the algorithm or the people who made the decision to use it in their product either didn't test that it worked for darker skin colours or worse, they knew the faults but didn't care enough not to use it. That's racism to me.
You don't need to have something better in mind to criticize something. Criticism alone can be useful if the endeavor didn't need to be attempted at all.
Racist algorithms, and faces that we miss