Amazon, Microsoft, and IBM are under pressure to follow Google and drop gender labels like 'man' and 'woman' from their AI

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Amazon, Microsoft, and IBM are under pressure to follow Google and drop gender labels like 'man' and 'woman' from their AI

Google's API no longer uses gendered labels for photos

 

• Microsoft, IBM, and Amazon are under pressure to stop using gender labels such as "man" or "woman" for their facial recognition and AI services.
• Google announced its AI tool would stop adding gender classification tags in mid-February, instead tagging images of people with neutral terms such as "person."
• Joy Buolamwini, a researcher who found AI tools misclassified people's gender, told Business Insider: "There is a choice... I would encourage all companies to reexamine the identity labels they are using as demographic markers."

 

 

Microsoft, Amazon, and IBM are under pressure to stop automatically applying gendered labels such as "man" or "woman" from images of people, after Google announced in February it would stop using such tags.

 

All four companies offer powerful artificial intelligence tools that can classify objects and people in an image. The tools can variously describe famous landmarks, facial expressions, logos and gender, and have many applications including content moderation, scientific research, and identity verification.

 

Google said it would drop gender labels from its Cloud Vision API image classification service last week, saying that it wasn't possible to infer someone's gender by appearance and that such labels could exacerbate bias.

 

Now the AI researchers who helped bring about the change say Amazon's Rekognition, IBM's Watson, and Microsoft's Azure facial recognition should follow suit.

 

Joy Buolamwini, a computer scientist at MIT and expert in AI bias, told Business Insider: "Google's move sends a message that design choices can be changed. With technology it is easy to think some things cannot be changed or are inevitable. This isn't necessarily true."

 

 

Microsoft's AI continues to classify people in images by binary gender

 

 

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