General Intelligence
How a 2018 Research Paper Led Amazon, Microsoft, and IBM to Curb Their Facial Recognition Programs
But it’s just the tip of the facial recognition industry iceberg
Welcome to General Intelligence, OneZero’s weekly dive into the A.I. news and research that matters.
In February 2018, Joy Buolamwini and Timnit Gebru published a paper that would reverberate through academia and the media, growing louder and more prescient until this Wednesday, when Amazon decided to put a one-year moratorium on police use of its facial recognition technology.
The paper was called “Gender Shades,” and it showed strong statistical evidence that facial recognition from companies investing billions in A.I. research and development, namely Microsoft, IBM, and Face++, performed worse when analyzing women and people with darker skin.
The American Civil Liberties Union picked up on Buolamwini’s research and ran members of Congress through Amazon’s Rekognition system, mismatching 28 of them to mugshots of people who had been arrested. The argument was clear: If members of Congress could be misidentified by facial recognition, their constituents could be, too.
